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CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT. A Study in 
American Politics. i6mo, J1.25. 

MERE LITERATURE, and Other Essays. i2mo, 
J1.50. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
Boston and New York. 



MERE LITERATURE 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 



WOODROW WILSON 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(C|)e BitactjsiDe ^xzi^^ Cambridge 



C "^i^l^n 



TSss^'l 









•'•■' -^ 



Copyright, 1896, 
Bt WOODROW WILSON 



All rights reserved.^ 

f 






TO 

STOCKTON AXSON 

BY EVERY GIFT OF MIND A CRITIC 

AND LOVER OF LETTERS 

BY EVERY GIFT OF HEART A FRIEND 

THIS LITTLE VOLUME 

IS AFFECTIONATELY 

DEDICATED 



CONTENTS. 

PAQI 

I. Mere Literature 1 

n. The Author Himself ..... 28 

m. On an Author's Choice of Company ... 50 

rV. A Literary Politician 69 

V. The Interpreter of English Liberty . . 104 

VI. The Truth of the Matter .... 161 

Vn. A Calendar of Great Americans . . . 187 

VIII. The Course of American History . . . 213 



*^* All but one of the essays brought together in this volume 
have already been printed, either in the Atlantic Monthly, the 
Century Magazine, or the Forum. The essay on Burke appears 
here for the first time in print. 



MERE LITERATURE. 



I. 

"MERE LITERATURE." 

A SINGULAR phrase this, " mere literature," — 
the irreverent invention of a scientific age. Litera- 
ture we know, but " mere " literature ? We are 
not to read it as if it meant sheer literature, litera- 
ture in the essence, stripped of all accidental or 
ephemeral elements, and left with nothing but its 
immortal charm and power. " Mere literature" is 
a serious sneer, conceived in all honesty by the 
scientific mind, which despises things that do not 
fall within the categories of demonstrable know- 
ledge. It means nothing hut literature^ as who 
should say, "mere talk," "mere fabrication," 
"mere pastime." The scientist, with his head 
comfortably and excusably full of knowable things, 
takes nothing seriously and with his hat off, except 
human knowledge. The creations of the human 
spirit are, from his point of view, incalculable 
vagaries, irresponsible phenomena, to be regarded 



2 MEBE LITERATURE. 

only as play, and, for the mind's good, only as 
recreation, — to be used to while away the tedium 
of a railway journey, or to amuse a period of rest 
or convalescence ; mere byplay, mere make-believe. 
And so very whimsical things sometimes happen, 
because of this scientific and positivist spirit of the 
age, when the study of the literature of any lan- 
guage is made part of the curriculum of our col- 
leges. The more delicate and subtle purposes of 
the study are put quite out of countenance, and 
literature is commanded to assume the phrases and 
the methods of science. It would be xerj painful 
if it should turn out that schools and universities 
were agencies of Philistinism ; but there are some 
things which should prepare us for such a discov- 
ery. Our present plans for teadiing everybody 
involve certain unpleasant things quite inevitably. 
It is obvious that you cannot have universal educa- 
tion without restricting your teaching to such things 
as can be universally understood. It is plain that 
you cannot impart " university methods " to thou- 
sands, or create " investigators " by the score, 
unless you confine your university education to 
matters which dull men can investigate, your lab- 
oratory training to tasks which mere plodding dili- 
gence and submissive patience can compass. Yet, 
if you do so limit and constrain what you teach, 



MEBE LITERATURE. 8 

you thrust taste and insight and delicacy of per- 
ception out of the schools, exalt the obvious and 
the merely useful above the things which are only 
imaginatively or spiritually conceived, make educa- 
tion an affair of tasting and handling and smelling, 
and so create Philistia, that country in which they 
speak of "mere literature." I suppose that in 
Nirvana one would speak in like wise of "mere 
life." 

The fear, at any rate, that such things may hap- 
pen cannot fail -to set us anxiously pondering cer- 
tain questions about the systematic teaching of 
literature in our schools and colleges. How are we 
to impart classical writings to the children of the 
general public ? " Beshrew the general public ! " 
cries Mr. Birrell. " What in the name of the 
Bodleian has the general public got to do with 
literature?" Unfortunately, it has a great deal to 
do with it ; for are we not complacently forcing the 
general public into our universities, and are we not 
arranging that all its sons shall be instructed how 
they may themselves master and teach our litera- 
ture ? You have nowadays, it is believed, only to 
heed the suggestions of pedagogics in order to know 
how to impart Burke or Browning, Dryden or Swift. 
There are certain practical difficulties, indeed ; but 
there are ways of overcoming them. You must 



4 MERE LITERATURE. 

have strength if you would handle with real mas- 
tery the firm fibre of these men ; you must have a 
heart, moreover, to feel their warmth, an eye to see 
what they see, an imagination to keep them com- 
pany, a pulse to experience their delights. But if 
you have none of these things, you may make shift 
to do without them. You may count the words 
they use, instead, note the changes of phrase they 
make in successive revisions, put their rhythm into 
a scale of feet, run their allusions — particularly 
their female allusions — to cover, detect them in 
their previous reading. Or, if none of these things 
please you, or you find the big authors difficult 
or dull, you may drag to light all the minor writers 
of their time, who are easy to understand. By set- 
ting an example in such methods you render great 
services in certain directions. You make the higher 
degrees of our universities available for the large 
number of respectable men who can count, and 
measure, and search diligently ; and that may prove 
no small matter. You divert attention from thought, 
which is not always easy to get at, and fix attention 
upon language, as upon a curious mechanism, which 
can be perceived with the bodily eye, and which is 
worthy to be studied for its own sake, quite apart 
from anything it may mean. You encourage the 
examination of forms, grammatical and metrical, 



MERE LITEBATURE. 5 

which can be quite accurately determined and quite 
exhaustively catalogued. You bring all the visible 
phenomena of writing to light and into ordered 
system. You go further, and show how to make 
careful literal identification of stories somewhere 
told ill and without art with the same stories told 
over again by the masters, well and with the trans- 
figuring effect of genius. You thus broaden the 
area of science ; for you rescue the concrete phe- 
nomena of the expression of thought — the neces- 
sary syllabification which accompanies it, the inev- 
itable juxtaposition of words, the constant use of 
particles, the habitual display of roots, the invet- 
erate repetition of names, the recurrent employment 
of meanings heard or read — from their confusion 
with the otherwise unclassifiable manifestations of 
what had hitherto been accepted, without critical 
examination, under the lump term " literature," 
simply for the pleasure and spiritual edification to 
be got from it. 

An instructive differentiation ensues. In con- 
trast with the orderly phenomena of speech and 
writing, which are amenable to scientific processes 
of examination and classification, and which take 
rank with the orderly successions of change in 
nature, we have what, for want of a more exact 
term, we call " mere literature," — the literature 



6 m:ebe litebatube. 

which is not an expression of form, but an expres- 
sion of spirit. This is a fugitive and troublesome 
thing, and perhaps does not belong in well-con- 
ceived plans of universal instruction ; for it offers 
many embarrassments to pedagogic method. It 
escapes all scientific categories. It is not pervious 
to research. It is too wayward to be brought under 
the discipline of exposition. It is an attribute of 
so many different substances at one and the same 
time, that the consistent scientific man must needs 
put it forth from his company, as without respon- 
sible connections. By " mere literature " he means 
mere evanescent color, wanton trick of phrase, per- 
verse departures from categorical statement, — 
something all personal equation, such stuff as 
dreams are made of. 

We must not all, however, be impatient of this 
truant child of fancy. When the schools cast her 
out, she will stand in need of friendly succor, and 
we must train our spirits for the function. We 
must be free-hearted in order to make her 
happy, for she will accept entertainment from no 
sober, prudent fellow who shall counsel her to mend 
her ways. She has always made light of hardship, 
and she has never loved or obeyed any, save those 
who were of her own mind, — those who were in- 
dulgent to her hmnors, responsive to her ways of 



MERE LITERATURE. 7 

thought, attentive to her whims, content with her 
" mere " charms. She already has her small fol- 
lowing of devotees, like all charming, capricious 
mistresses. There are some still who think that 
to know her is better than a liberal education. 

There is but one way in which you can take 
mere literature as an education, and that is directly, 
at first hand. Almost any media except her own 
language and touch and tone are non-conducting. 
A descriptive catalogue of a collection of paintings 
is no substitute for the little areas of color and 
form themselves. You do not want to hear about 
a beautiful woman, simply, — how she was dressed, 
how she bore herseK, how the fine color flowed 
sweetly here and there upon her cheeks, how her 
eyes burned and melted, how her voice thrilled 
through the ears of those about her. If you have 
ever seen a woman, these things but tantalize and 
hurt you, if you cannot see her. You want to be 
in her presence. You know that only your own 
eyes can give you direct knowledge of her. No- 
thing but her presence contains her life. 'T is 
the same with the authentic products of literature. 
You can never get their beauty at second hand, or 
feel their power except by direct contact with them. 

It is a strange and occult thing how this quality 
of " mere hterature " enters into one book, and is 



8 MEBE LITEBATUBE. 

absent from another ; but no man who has once 
felt it can mistake it. I was reading the other 
day a book about Canada. It is written in what 
the reviewers have pronounced to be an " admira- 
ble, spirited style." By this I take them to mean 
that it is grammatical, orderly, and full of strong 
adjectives. But these reviewers would have known 
more about the style in which it is written if they 
had noted what happens on page 84. There a 
quotation from Burke occurs. " There is," says 
Burke, " but one healing, catholic principle of 
toleration which ought to find favor in this house. 
It is wanted not only in our colonies, but here. The 
thirsty earth of our own country is gasping and 
gaping and crying out for that healing shower from 
heaven. The noble lord has told you of the right 
of those people by treaty ; but I consider the right 
of conquest so little, and the right of human nature 
so much, that the former has very little considera- 
tion with me. I look upon the people of Canada 
as coming by the dispensation of God under the 
British government. I would have us govern it in 
the same manner as the all-wise disposition of 
Providence would govern it. We know he suf- 
fers the sun to shine upon the righteous and the 
unrighteous ; and we ought to suffer all classes to 
enjoy equally the right of worshiping God accord- 



MERE LITERATURE. 9 

ing to the light he has been pleased to give them.'* 
The peculiarity of such a passage as that is, that it 
needs no context. Its beauty seems almost inde- 
pendent of its subject matter. It comes on that 
eighty-fourth page like a burst of music in the 
midst of small talk, — a tone of sweet harmony 
heard amidst a rattle of plirases. The mild noise 
was unobjectionable enough until the music came. 
There is a breath and stir of Hf e in those sentences 
of Burke's which is to be perceived in nothing else 
in that volume. Youi* pulses catch a quicker 
movement from them, and are stronger on their 
account. 

It is so with all essential literature. It has a 
quality to move you, and you can never mistake it, 
if you have any blood in you. And it has also a 
power to instruct you which is as effective as it is 
subtle, and which no research or systematic method 
can ever rival. 'T is a sore pity if that power can- 
not be made available in the classroom. It is not 
merely that it quickens your thought and fills your 
imagination with the images that have illuminated 
the choicer minds of the race. It does indeed ex- 
ercise the faculties in this wise, bringing them into 
the best atmosphere, and into the presence of the 
men of greatest charm and force ; but it does a 
great deal more than that. It acquaints the mind, 



10 MEBE LITEBATURE. 

by direct contact, with the forces which really gov- 
ern and modify the world from generation to gen- 
eration. There is more of a nation's politics to be 
got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic 
writers upon public affairs and constitutions. Epics 
are better mirrors of manners than chronicles ; 
dramas oftentimes let you into the secrets of stat- 
utes ; orations stirred by a deep energy of emotion 
or resolution, passionate pamphlets that survive their 
mission because of the direct action of their style 
along permanent lines of thought, contain more 
history than parliamentary journals. It is not 
knowledge that moves the world, but ideals, con- 
victions, the opinions or fancies that have been held 
or followed ; and whoever studies humanity ought 
to study it alive, practice the vivisection of reading 
literature, and acquaint himself with something 
more than anatomies which are no longer in use by 
spirits. 

There are some words of Thibaut, the great 
jurist, which have long seemed to me singularly 
penetrative of one of the secrets of the intellectual 
life. " I told him," he says, — he is speaking of 
an interview with Niebuhr, — "I told him that I 
owed my gayety and vigor, in great part, to my 
love for the classics of all ages, even those outside 
the domain of jurisprudence." Not only the gayety 



MERE LITERATURE. 11 

and vigor of his hale old age, surely, but also his 
insight into the meaning and purpose of laws and 
institutions. The jurist who does not love the 
classics of all ages is like a post-mortem doctor pre- 
siding at a birth, a maker of manikins prescribing 
for a disease of the blood, a student of masks set- 
ting up for a connoisseur in smiles and kisses. In 
narrating history, you are speaking of what was 
done by men ; in discoursing of laws, you are seek- 
ing to show what courses of action, and what man- 
ner of dealing with one another, men have adopted. 
You can neither tell the story nor conceive the law 
till you know how the men you speak of regarded 
themselves and one another ; and I know of no way 
of learning this but by reading the stories they have 
told of themselves, the songs they have sung, the 
heroic adventures they have applauded. I must 
know what, if anything, they revered ; I must hear 
their sneers and gibes ; must learn in what accents 
they spoke love within the family circle ; with what 
grace they obeyed their superiors in station ; how 
they conceived it politic to live, and wise to die ; 
how they esteemed property, and what they deemed 
privilege ; when they kept holiday, and why ; when 
they were prone to resist oppression, and where- 
fore, — I must see things with their eyes, before I 
can comprehend their law books. Their jural re- 



12 MERE LITERATUBE. 

lationships are not independent of their way of liv- 
ing, and their way of thinking is the mirror of their 
way of living. 

It is doubtless due to the scientific spirit of the 
age that these plain, these immemorial truths are 
in danger of becoming obscured. Science, under 
the influence of the conception of evolution, devotes 
itself to the study of forms, of specific differences, 
of the manner in which the same principle of life 
manifests itseK variously under the compulsions of 
changes of environment. It is thus that it has be- 
come " scientific " to set forth the manner in which 
man's nature submits to man's circumstances; 
scientific to disclose morbid moods, and the con- 
ditions which produce them ; scientific to regard 
man, not as the centre or source of power, but as 
subject to power, a register of external forces in- 
stead of an originative soul, and character as a 
product of man's circumstances rather than a sign 
of man's mastery over circumstance. It is thus 
that it has become " scientific " to analyze lan- 
guage as itself a commanding element in man's life. 
The history of word-roots, their modification under 
the influences of changes wrought in the vocal 
organs by habit or by climate, the laws of phonetic 
change to which they are obedient, and their per- 
sistence under all disguises of dialect, as if they 



MERE LITERATURE. 13 

were full of a self-originated life, a self-directed 
energy of influence, is united with the study of 
grammatical forms in the construction of scientific 
conceptions of the evolution and uses of hmnan 
speech. The impression is created that literature 
is only the chosen vessel of these forms, disclosing 
to us their modification in use and structure from 
age to age. Such vitality as the masterpieces of 
genius possess comes to seem only a dramatization 
of the fortunes of words. Great writers construct 
for the adventures of language their appropriate 
epics. Or, if it be not the words themselves that 
are scrutinized, but the style of their use, that style 
becomes, instead of a fine essence of personality, a 
matter of cadence merely, or of grammatical and 
structural relationships. Science is the study of 
the forces of the world of matter, the adjustments, 
the apparatus, of the universe ; and the scientific 
study of literature has likewise become a study of 
apparatus, — of the forms in which men utter 
thought, and the forces by which those forms have 
been and still are being modified, rather than of 
thought itself. "" 

The essences of literature of course remain the 
same under all forms, and the true study of Htera- 
ture is the study of these essences, — a study, not 
of forms or of differences, but of likenesses, — like- 



14 MEBE LITERATURE. 

nesses of spirit and intent under whatever varieties 
of method, running through all forms of speech 
like the same music along the chords of various in- 
struments. There is a sense in which literature is 
independent of form, just as there is a sense in 
which music is independent of its instrument. It 
is my cherished belief that Apollo's pipe contained 
as much eloquent music as any modern orchestra. 
Some books live ; many die : wherein is the secret 
of immortality ? Not in beauty of form, nor even 
in force of passion. We might say of literature 
what Wordsworth said of poetry, the most easily 
immortal part of literature : it is " the impassioned 
expression which is in the countenance of all science ; 
it is the breath of the finer spirit of all knowledge." 
Poetry has the easier immortality because it has 
the sweeter accent when it speaks, because its 
phrases linger in our ears to delight them, because 
its truths are also melodies. Prose has much to 
overcome, — its plainness of visage, its less musical 
accents, its homelier turns of phrase. But it also 
may contain the immortal essence of truth and 
seriousness and high thought. It too may clothe 
conviction with the beauty that must make it shine 
forever. Let a man but have beauty in his heart, 
and, believing something with his might, put it 
forth arrayed as he sees it, the lights and shadows 



/ 



MERE LITEBATURE. 15 

falling upon it on his page as they fall upon it in 
his heart, and he may die assured that that beauty 
will not pass away out of the world. 

Biographers have often been puzzled by the con- 
trast between certain men as they lived and as they 
wrote. Schopenhauer's case is one of the most 
singular. A man of turbident life, suffering him- 
self to be cut to exasperation by the petty worries 
of his lot, he was nevertheless calm and wise when 
he wrote, as if the Muse had rebuked him. He 
wrote at a still elevation, where small and tempo- 
rary things did not come to disturb him. 'T is a 
pity that for some men this elevation is so far to 
seek. They lose permanency by not finding it. 
Could there be a deliberate regimen of life for the 
author, it is plain enough how he ought to live, not 
as seeking fame, but as deserving it. 

" Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy 
To those who woo her with too slavish knees ; 
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy, 
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease. 

" Ye love-sick bards, repay her scorn with scorn ; 
Ye love-sick artists, madmen that ye are, 
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu ; 
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you." 

It behooves all minor authors to realize the pos- 
sibility of their being discovered some day, and 



16 MERE LITEBATUBE. 

M4 exposed to the general scrutiny. They ought to 
live as if conscious of the risk. They ought to 
purge their hearts of everything that is not genuine 
and capable of lasting the world a century, at least, 
if need be. Mere literature is made of spirit. The 
difficulties of style are the artist's difficulties with 
his tools. The spirit that is in the eye, in the pose, 
in mien or gesture, the painter must find in his 
color-box; as he must find also the spirit that 
nature displays upon the face of the fields or in the 
hidden places of the forest. The writer has less 
obvious means. Word and spirit do not easily 
consort. The language which the philologists set 
out before us with such curious erudition is of very 
little use as a vehicle for the essences of the human 
spirit. It is too sophisticated and self-conscious. 
What you need is, not a critical knowledge of 
language, but a quick feeling for it. You must 
recognize the affinities between your spirit and its 
idioms. You must immerse your phrase in your 
thought, your thought in your phrase, till each be- 
comes saturated with the other. Then what you 
produce is as necessarily fit for permanency as if it 
were incarnated spirit. 

And you must produce in color, with the touch 
of imagination which lifts what you write away 
from the dull levels of mere exposition. Black- 



MEBE LITER ATUBE. 17 

and-wMte sketches may serve some purposes of the 
artist, but very little of actual nature is in mere 
black-and-white. The imagination never works 
thus with satisfaction. Nothing is ever conceived 
completely when conceived so grayly, without suf- 
fusion of real light. The mind creates/ as great 
Nature does, in colors, with deep chiaroscuro and 
burning lights. This is true not only of poetry 
and essentially imaginative writing, but also of the 
writing which seeks nothing more than to penetrate 
the meaning of actual affairs, — the writing of 
the greatest historians and philosophers, the utter- 
ances of orators and of the great masters of polit- 
ical exposition. Their narratives, their analyses, 
their appeals, their conceptions of principle, are aU 
dipped deep in the colors of the life they expound. 
Their minds respond only to realities, their eyes see 
only actual circumstance. Their sentences quiver 
and are quick with visions of human affairs, — how 
minds are bent or governed, how action is shaped 
or thwarted. The great " constructive " minds, as 
we call them, are of this sort. They " construct " 
by seeing what others have not imagination enough 
to see. They do not always know more, but they 
always realize more. Let the singular reconstruc- 
tion of Roman history and institutions by Theodor 
Mommsen serve as an illustration. Safe men dis- 



18 MERE LITERATURE. 

trust this great master. They cannot find what he 
finds in the documents. They will draw you 
truncated figures of the antique Roman state, and 
tell you the limbs cannot be 'found, the features of 
the face have nowhere been unearthed. They will 
cite you fragments such as remain, and show you 
how far these can be pieced together toward the 
making of a complete description of private life 
and public function in those first times when the 
Roman commonwealth was young; but what the 
missing sentences were they can only weakly con- 
jecture. Their eyes cannot descry those distant 
days with no other aids than these. Only the 
greatest are dissatisfied, and go on to paint that 
ancient life with the materials that will render it 
lifelike, — the materials of the constructive imagi- 
nation. They have other sources of information. 
They see living men in the old documents. Give 
them but the torso, and they will supply head and 
limbs, bright and animate as they must have been. 
If Mommsen does not quite do that, another man, 
with Mommsen's eye and a touch more of color on 
his brush, might have done it, — may yet do it. 

It is in this way that we get some glimpse of the 
only relations that scholarship bears to literature. 
Literature can do without exact scholarship, or 
any scholarship at all, though it may impoverish 



MERE LITERATURE. 19 

itseK thereby; but scholarship cannot do with- 
out literature. It needs literature to float it, to 
set it current, to authenticate it to the race, to get 
it out of closets, and into the brains of men who 
stir abroad. It will adorn literature, no doubt ; 
literature will be the richer for its presence ; but 
it will not, it cannot, of itself create literature. 
Rich stuffs from the East do not create a king, nor 
warlike trappings a conqueror.O There is, indeed, 
a natural antagonism, let it be frankly said, be- 
tween the standards of scholarship and the stan- 
dards of literature. Exact scholarship values 
things in direct proportion as they are verifiable ; 
but literature knows nothing of such tests. The 
truths which it seeks are the truths of self-expres- 
sion. It is a thing of convictions, of insights, of 
what is felt and seen and heard and hoped for. Its 
meanings lurk behind nature, not in the facts of 
its phenomena. It speaks of things as the man 
who utters it saw them, not necessarily as God 
made them. The personality of the speaker runs 
throughout all the sentences of real literature. That 
personality may not be the personality of a poet : 
it may be only the personality of the penetrative 
seer. It may not have the atmosphere in which 
visions are seen, but only that in wliich men and 
affairs look keenly cut in outline, boldly massed 



20 MERE LITEBATUBE. 

in bulk, consummately grouped in detail, to the 
reader as to the writer. Sentences of perfectly 
clarified wisdom may be literature no less than 
stanzas of inspired song, or the intense utterances 
of impassioned feeling. The personality of the 
sunlight is in the keen lines of light that run 
along the edges of a sword no less than in the burn- 
ing splendor of the rose or the radiant kindlings of 
a woman's eye. You may feel the power of one 
master of thought playing upon your brain as you 
may feel that of another playing upon your heart. 
Scholarship gets into literature by becoming 
part of the originating individuality of a master of 
thought. No man is a master of thought without 
being also a master of its vehicle and instrument, 
style, that subtle medium of all its evasive effects 
of light and shade. Scholarship is material ; it 
is not life. It becomes immortal only when it is 
worked upon by conviction, by schooled and chas- 
tened imagination, by thought that runs alive out 
of the inner fountains of individual insight and 
purpose. Colorless, or without suffusion of light 
from some source of light, it is dead, and wiU not 
twice be looked at ; but made part of the life of a 
great mind, subordinated, absorbed, put forth with 
authentic stamp of currency on it, minted at some 
definite mint and bearing some sovereign image, it 



MEEE LITERATURE. 21 

will even outlast the time when it shall have ceased 
to deserve the acceptance of scholars, — when it 
shall, in fact, have become " mere literature." 

Scholarship is the realm of nicely adjusted opin- 
ion. It is the business of scholars to assess evi- 
dence and test conclusions, to discriminate values 
and reckon probabilities. Literature is the realm 
of conviction and vision. Its points of view are as 
various as they are oftentimes unverifiable. It 
speaks individual faiths. Its groundwork is not 
erudition, but reflection and fancy. Your thorough- 
going scholar dare not reflect. To reflect is to let 
himself in on his material ; whereas what he wants 
is to keep himself apart, and view his materials in 
an air that does not color or refract. To reflect is 
to throw an atmosphere about what is in your 
mind, — an atmosphere which holds all the colors 
of your life. Reflection summons all associations, 
and they so throng and move that they dominate 
the mind's stage at once. The plot is in their 
hands. Scholars, therefore, do not reflect ; they 
label, group kind with kind, set forth in schemes, 
expound with dispassionate method. Their minds 
are not stages, but museums ; nothing is done 
there, but very curious and valuable collections are 
kept there. If literature use scholarship, it is only 
to fill it with fancies or shape it to new standards, 
of which of itself it can know nothing. 



22 MEBE LITEBATUBE. 

True, there are books reckoned primarily books 
of science and of scholarship which have neverthe- 
less won standing as literature ; books of science 
such as Newton wrote, books of scholarship such 
as Gibbon's. But science was only the vestibule 
by which such a man as Newton entered the temple 
of nature, and the art he practiced Was not the art 
of exposition, but the art of divination. He was 
not only a scientist, but also a seer ; and we shall not 
lose sight of Newton because we value what he was 
more than what he knew. If we continue Gibbon 
in his fame, it will be for love of his art, not for 
worship of his scholarship. We some of us, now- 
adays, know the period of which he wrote better 
even than he did ; but which one of us shall build 
so admirable a monument to ourselves, as artists, 
out of what we know? The scholar finds his im- 
mortality in the form he gives to his work. It is 
a hard saying, but the truth of it is inexorable : be 
an artist, or prepare for oblivion. You may write 
a chronicle, but you will not serve yourself thereby. 
You will only serve some fellow who shall come 
after you, possessing, what you did not have, an 
ear for the words you could not hit upon ; an eye 
for the colors you could not see ; a hand for the 
strokes you missed. 

Real literature you can always distinguish by its 



MEBE LITERATUBE. 23 

form, and yet it is not possible to indicate the 
form it should have. It is easy to say that it 
should have a form suitable to its matter ; but how 
suitable? Suitable to set the matter off, adorn, 
embellish it, or suitable simply to bring it directly, 
quick and potent, to the apprehension of the reader ? 
This is the question of style, about which many 
masters have had many opinions ; upon which you 
can make up no safe generalization from the prac- 
tice of those who have unquestionably given to the 
matter of their thought immortal form, an accent 
or a countenance never to be forgotten. Who shall 
say how much of Burke's splendid and impressive 
imagery is part and stuff of his thought, or tell 
why even that part of Newman's prose which is de- 
void of ornament, stripped to its shining skin, and 
running bare and lithe and athletic to carry its 
tidings to men, should promise to enjoy as certain 
an immortality ? Why should Lamb go so quaintly 
and elaborately to work upon his critical essays, 
taking care to perfume every sentence, if possible, 
with th^ fine savor of an old phrase, if the same 
business could be as effectively done in the plain 
and even cadences of Mr. Matthew Arnold's prose ? 
Why should Gibbon be so formal, so stately, so 
elaborate, when he had before his eyes the example 
of great Tacitus, whose direct, sententious style had 



24 MEBE LITERATURE. 

outlived by so many hundred years * the very lan- 
guage in which he wrote ? In poetry, who shall 
measure the varieties of style lavished upon similar 
themes? The matter of vital thought is not sep- 
arable from the thinker ; its forms must suit his 
handling as well as fit his conception. ^ Any style 
is author's stuff which is suitable to his purpose and 
his fancy. He may use rich fabrics with which to 
costume his thoughts, or he may use simple stone 
from which to sculpture them, and leave them 
bare. His only limits are those of art. He may 
not indulge a taste for the merely curious or fan- 
tastic. The quaint writers have quaint thoughts ; 
their material is suitable. They do not merely 
satisfy themselves as virtuosi, with collections of 
odd phrases and obsolete meanings. They needed 
twisted words to fit the eccentric patterns of their 
thought. The great writer has always dignity, re- 
straint, propriety, adequateness ; what time he 
loses these qualities he ceases to be great. His 
style neither creaks nor breaks under his passion, 
but carries the strain with unshaken strength. It 
is not trivial or mean, but speaks what small mean- 
ings fall in its way with simplicity, as conscious of 
their smallness. Its playfulness is within bounds ; 
its laugh never bursts too boisterously into a 
guffaw. A great style always knows what it would 



MERE LITERATURE. 25 

be at, and does the tiling appropriately, with the 
larger sort of taste. 

This is the condemnation of tricks of phrase, de- 
vices to catch the attention, exaggerations and loud 
talk to hold it. No writer can afford to strive 
after effect, if his striving is to be apparent. For 
just and permanent effect is missed altogether 
unless it be so completely attained as to seem like 
some touch of sunlight, perfect, natural, inevitable, 
wrought without effort and without deliberate pur- 
pose to be effective. Mere audacity of attempt 
can, of course, never win the wished for result ; 
and if the attempt be successful, it is not auda- 
cious. What we call audacity in a great writer 
has no touch of temerity, sauciness, or arrogance in 
it. It is simply high spirit, a dasliing and splen- 
did display of strength. Boldness is ridiculous 
unless it be impressive, and it can be impressive 
only when backed by solid forces of character and 
attainment. Your plebeian hack cannot afford the 
showy paces ; only the full-blooded Arabian has 
the sinew and proportion to lend them perfect 
grace and propriety. The art of letters eschews 
the bizarre as rigidly as does every other fine art. 
It mixes its colors with brains, and is obedient to 
gi'eat Nature's sane standards of right adjustment 
in aU that it attempts. 



26 MERE LITEBATUBE, 

You can make no catalogue of these features of 
great writing; there is no science of literature. 
Literature in its essence is mere spirit, and you 
must experience it rather than analyze it too for- 
mally. It is the door to nature and to ourselves. 
It opens our hearts to receive the experiences of 
great men and the conceptions of great races. It 
awakens us to the significance of action and to the 
singular power of mental habit. It airs our souls 
in the wide atmosphere of contemplation. " In 
these bad days, when it is thought more educa- 
tionally useful to know the principle of the com- 
mon pump than Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn," as 
Mr. Birrell says, we cannot afford to let one single 
precious sentence of " mere Hterature " go by us 
unread or unpraised. If this free people to which 
we belong is to keep its fine spirit, its perfect tem- 
per amidst affairs, its high courage in the face of 
difficulties, its wise temperateness and wide-eyed 
hope, it must continue to drink deep and often 
from the old wells of English undefiled, quaff the 
keen tonic of its best ideals, keep its blood warm 
with all the great utterances of exalted purpose 
and pure principle of which its matchless litera- 
ture is full. The great spirits of the past must 
command us in the tasks of the future. Mere 
literature wiU keep us pure and keep us strong. 



MEEE LITERATURE. 27 

Even though it puzzle or altogether escape scien- 
tific method, it may keep our horizon clear for us, 
and our eyes glad to look bravely forth upon the 
world. 



n. 

THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

Who can help wondering, concerning the modern 
multitude of books, where all these companions of 
his reading hours will be buried when they die ; 
which will have monuments erected to them ; which 
escape the envy of time and live ? It is pathetic 
to think of the number that must be forgotten, 
after having been removed from the good places to 
make room for their betters. 

Much the most pathetic thought about books, 
however, is that excellence will not save them. 
Their fates will be as whimsical as those of the 
humankind which produces them. Knaves find it 
as easy to get remembered as good men. It is not 
right living or learning or kind offices, simply and 
of themselves, but — something else that gives 
immortality of fame. Be a book never so schol- 
arly, it may die ; be it never so witty, or never so 
full of good feeling and of an honest statement 
of truth, it may not live. 

When once a book has become immortal, we 
think that we can see why it became so. It contained, 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 29 

we perceive, a casting of thought which could not 
but arrest and retain men's attention; it said some 
things once and for all because it gave them their 
best expression. Or else it spoke with a grace or 
with a fire of imagination, with a sweet cadence 
of phrase and a full harmony of tone, which have 
made it equally dear to all generations of those 
who love the free play of fancy or the incomparable 
music of perfected himaan speech. Or perhaps it 
uttered with candor and simplicity some universal 
sentiment ; perchance pictured something in the 
tragedy or the comedy of man's life as it was never 
pictured before, and must on that account be read 
and read again as not to be superseded. There 
must be something special, we judge, either in its 
form or in its substance, to account for its unwonted 
fame and fortune. 

This upon first analysis, taking one book at a 
time. A look deeper into the heart of the matter 
enables us to catch at least a glimpse of a single 
and common source of immortality. The world is 
attracted by books as each man is attracted by his 
several friends. You recommend that capital fel- 
low So-and-So to the acquaintance of others because 
of his discriminating and diverting powers of obser- 
vation : the very tones and persons — it would 
seem the very selves — of every type of man live 



30 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

again in his mimicries and descriptions. He is the 
dramatist of your circle ; you can never forget him, 
nor can any one else ; his circle of acquaintances can 
never grow smaller. Could he live on and retain 
perennially that wonderful freshness and vivacity 
of his, he must become the most famous guest and 
favorite of the world. Who that has known a man 
quick and shrewd to see dispassionately the inner 
history, the reason and the ends, of the combinations 
of society, and at the same time eloquent to tell of 
them, with a hold on the attention gained by a cer- 
tain quaint force and sagacity resident in no other 
man, can find it difficult to understand why we 
still resort to Montesquieu? OPossibly there are 
circles favored of the gods who have known some 
fellow of infinite store of miscellaneous and curious 
learning, who has greatly diverted both himself 
and his friends by a way peculiar to himseK of giv- 
ing it out upon any and all occasions, item by item, 
as if it were all homogeneous and of a piece, and 
by his odd skill in making unexpected application 
of it to out-of-the-way, unpromising subjects, as if 
there were in his view of things mental no such dis- 
integrating element as incongruity. Such a circle 
would esteem it strange were Burton not beloved 
of the world. And so of those, if any there be, 
who have known men of simple, calm, transparent 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 31 

natures, untouched by storm or perplexity, whose 
talk was full of such serious, placid reflection as 
seemed to mirror their own reverent hearts, — 
talk often prosy, but more often touchingly beauti- 
fiU, because of its nearness to nature and the solemn 
truth of life. There may be those, also, who have 
felt the thriU of personal contact with some stormy 
peasant nature full of strenuous, unsparing speech 
concerning men and affairs. These have known 
why a Wordsworth or a Carlyle must be read by 
all generations of those who love words of first-hand 
inspiration. In short, ^in every case of literary 
immortality originative personality is present. 
Not origination simply, — that may be mere inven- 
tion, which in literature has nothing immortal about 
it ; but origination which takes its stamp and char- 
acter from the originator, which is his spirit given 
to the world, which is himself outspoken. 

Individuality does not consist in the use of the 
very personal pronoun, /; it consists in tone, in 
method, in attitude, in point of view ; it consists in 
saying things in such a way that you will yourself 
be recognized as a force in saying them. Do we 
not at once know Lamb when he speaks? And 
even more formal Addison, does not his speech be- 
wray and endear him to us ? His personal charm 
is less distinct, much less fascinating, than that 



32 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

which goes with what Lamb speaks, but a charm he 
has sufficient for immortality. In Steele the mat- 
ter is more impersonal, more mortal. Some of Dr. 
Johnson's essays, you feel, might have been written 
by a dictionary. It is impersonal matter that is 
dead matter. Are you asked who fathered a cer- 
tain briUiant, poignant bit of political analysis? 
You say, Why, only Bagehot could have written 
that. Does a wittily turned verse make you. hesi- 
tate between laughter at its hit and grave thought 
because of its deeper, covert meaning ? Do you 
not know that only Lowell could do that ? Do 
you catch a strain of pure Elizabethan music and 
doubt whether to attribute it to Shakespeare or to 
another ? Do you not know the authors who still 
live? 

Now, the noteworthy thing about such individu- 
ality is that it wiU not develop under every star, or 
in one place just as well as in another; there is an 
atmosphere which kills it, and there is an atmo- 
sphere which fosters it. The atmosphere which 
kills it is the atmosphere of sophistication, where 
cleverness and fashion and knowingness thrive ; 
cleverness, which is froth, not strong drink ; fash- 
ion, which is a thing assumed, not a thing of 
nature ; and knowingness, which is naught. 

Of course there are born, now and again, as 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 33 

tokens of some rare mood of Nature, men of so 
intense and individual a cast that circumstance and 
surroundings affect them little more than friction 
affects an express train. They command their own 
development without even the consciousness that to 
command costs strength. These cannot be sophis- 
ticated ; for sophistication is subordination to the 
ways of your world. But these are the very great- 
est and the very rarest ; and it is not the greatest 
and the rarest alone who shape the world and its 
thought. That is done also by the great and the 
merely extraordinary. There is a rank and file in 
literature, even in the literature of immortality, and 
these must go much to school to the people about 
them. 

It is by the number and charm of the individual- 
ities which it contains that the literature of any 
country gains distinction. We turn anywhither to 
know men. The best way to foster literature, if it 
may be fostered, is to cultivate the author himself, 
— a plant of such delicate and precarious growth 
that special soils are needed to produce it in its full 
perfection. The conditions which foster individual- 
ity are those which foster simplicity, thought and 
action which are direct, naturalness, spontaneity. 
What are these conditions ? 

In the first place, a certain helpful ignorance. 



34 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

It is best for tlie author to be born away from lit- 
erary centres, or to be excluded from their ruling 
set if he be born in them. It is best that he start 
out with his thinking, not knowing how much has 
been thought and said about everything. A certain 
amount of ignorance will insure his sincerity, wiU 
increase his boldness and shelter his genuineness, 
which is his hope of power. Not ignorance of life, 
but Hf e may be learned in any neighborhood ; — 
not ignorance of the greater laws which govern 
human affairs, but they may be learned without a 
library of historians and commentators, by imagina- 
tive sense, by seeing better than by reading ; — not 
ignorance of the infinitudes of human circumstance, 
but these may be perceived without the intervention 
of universities ; — not ignorance of one's self and 
of one's neighbor ; but innocence of the sophistica- 
tions of learning, its research without love, its know- 
ledge without inspiration, its method without grace ; 
freedom from its shame at trying to know many 
things as well as from its pride of trying to know 
but one thing ; ignorance of that faith in small con- 
founding facts which is contempt for large reassur- 
ing principles. 

Our present problem is not how to clarify our 
reasonings and perfect our analyses, but how to 
reenrich and reenergize our literature. That litera- 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 35 

ture is suffering, not from ignorance, but from 
sophistication and self -consciousness ; and it is suf- 
fering hardly less from excess of logical method. 
Ratiocination does not keep us pure, render us 
earnest, or make us individual and specific forces 
in the world. Those inestimable results are ac- 
complished by whatever implants principle and 
conviction, whatever quickens with inspiration, 
fills with purpose and courage, gives outlook, and 
makes character. Reasoned thinking does indeed 
clear the mind's atmospheres and lay open to its 
view fields of action ; but it is loving and be- 
lieving, sometimes hating and distrusting, often 
prejudice and passion, always the many things 
which we call the one thing, character, which 
create and shape our acting. Life quite overtowers 
logic. Thinking and erudition alone will not equip 
for the great tasks and triumphs of Kfe and litera- 
ture : the persuading of other men's purposes,* the 
entrance into other men's minds to possess them 
forever. Culture broadens and sweetens literature, 
but native sentiment and unmarred individuality 
create it. Not all of mental power lies in the pro- 
cesses of thinking. There is power also in passion, 
in personality, in simple, native, uncritical con- 
viction, in unschooled feeling. The power of 
science, of system, is executive, not stimulative. I 



36 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

do not find that I derive inspiration, but only in- 
formation, from the learned historians and analysts 
of liberty ; but from the sonneteers, the poets, who, 
speak its spirit and its exalted purpose, — who, 
recking nothing of the historical method, obey only 
the high method of their own hearts, — what may 
a man not gain of courage and confidence in the 
right way of politics ? 

It is your direct, unhesitating, intent, headlong 
man, who has his sources in the mountains, who 
digs deep channels for himseK in the soil of his 
times and expands into the mighty river, to become-^ 
a landmark forever; and not your "broad" man, 
sprung from the schools, who spreads his shallow, 
extended waters over the wide surfaces of learning, 
to leave rich deposits, it may be, for other men's 
crops to grow in, but to be himself dried up by a 
few score summer noons. The man thrown early 
upon his own resources, and already become a con- 
queror of success before being thrown with the 
literary talkers ; the man grown to giant's stature 
in some rural library, and become exercised there 
in a giant's prerogatives before ever he has been 
laughingly told, to his heart's confusion, of scores 
of other giants dead and forgotten long ago ; the 
man grounded in hope and settled in conviction 
ere he has discovered how many hopes time has 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 37 

seen buried, how many convictions cruelly given 
the lie direct by fate ; the man who has carried 
his youth into middle age before going into the 
chill atmosphere of hlase sentiment ; the quiet, 
stern man who has cultivated literature on a little 
oatmeal before thrusting himself upon the great 
world as a prophet and seer ; the man who pro- 
nounces new eloquence in the rich dialect in which 
he was bred; the man come up to the capital 
from the provinces, — these are the men who peo- 
ple the world's mind with new creations, and give 
to the sophisticated learned of the next generation 
new names to conjure with. 

If you have a candid and well-informed friend 
among city lawyers, ask him where the best mas- 
ters of his profession are bred, — in the city or in 
the country. He will reply without hesitation, 
" In the coimtry." You will hardly need to have 
him state the reason. The country lawyer has 
been obliged to study all parts of the law alike, and 
he has known no reason why he should not do so. 
He has not had the chance to make himself a 
specialist in any one branch of the law, as is the 
fashion among city practitioners, and he has not 
coveted the opportunity to do it. There would not 
have been enough special cases to occupy or remun- 
erate him if he had coveted it. He has dared 



38 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

attempt the task of knowing the whole law, and 
yet without any sense of daring, but as a matter of 
course. In his own little town, in the midst of his 
own small library of authorities, it has not seemed 
to him an impossible task to explore all the topics 
that engage his profession ; the guiding principles, 
at any rate, of all branches of the great subject 
were open to him in a few books. And so it often 
happens that when he has found his sea legs on 
the sequestered inlets at home, and ventures, as 
he sometimes will, upon the great, troublous, and 
much-frequented waters of city practice in search 
of more work and larger fees, the country lawyer 
will once and again confound his city-bred brethren 
by discovering to them the fact that the law is a 
many-sided thing of principles, and not altogether 
a one-sided thing of technical rule and arbitrary 
precedent. 

It would seem to be necessary that the author 
who is to stand as a distinct and imperative indi- 
vidual among the company of those who express 
the world's thought should come to a hard crystal- 
lization before subjecting himself to the tense strain 
of cities, the corrosive acids of critical circles. 
The ability to see for one's self is attainable, not 
by mixing with crowds and ascertaining how they 
look at things, but by a certain aloofness and self- 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 39 

containment. The solitariness of some genius is 
not accidental; it is characteristic and essential. 
To the constructive imagination there are some im- 
mortal feats which are possible only in seclusion. 
The man must heed first and most of all the sug- 
gestions of his own spirit ; and the world can be 
seen from windows overlooking the street better 
than from the street itself. 

Literature grows rich, various, full- voiced largely 
through the re-discovery of truth, by thinking re- 
thought, by stories re-told, by songs re-sung. The 
song of human experience grows richer and richer 
in its harmonies, and must grow until the full ac- 
cord and melody are come. If too soon subjected 
to the tense strain of the city, a man cannot ex- 
pand ; he is beaten out of his natural shape by the 
incessant impact and press of men and affairs. It 
will often turn out that the unsophisticated man 
will display not only more force, but more literary 
skiU even, than the trained litterateur. For one 
thing, he will probably have enjoyed a fresher con- 
tact with old literature. He reads not for the sake 
of a critical acquaintance with this or that author, 
with no thought of going through all his writings 
and " working him up," but as he would ride a 
spirited horse, for love of the life and motion of it. 

A general impression seems to have gained cur- 



40 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

rency that the last of the bullying, omniscient 
critics was buried in the grave of Francis Jeffrey ; 
and it is becoming important to correct the misap- 
prehension. There never was a time when there 
was more superior knowledge, more specialist 
omniscience, among reviewers than there is to-day ; 
not pretended superior knowledge, but real. Jef- 
frey's was very real of its kind. For those who 
write books, one of the special, inestimable advan- 
tages of lacking a too intimate knowledge of the 
"world of letters " consists in not knowing all that 
is known by those who review books, in ignorance 
of the fashions among those who construct canons 
of taste. The modern critic is a leader of fashion. 
He carries with him the air of a literary worldli- 
ness. If your book be a novel, your reviewer will 
know all previous plots, all former, all possible, 
motives and situations. You cannot WTite any- 
thing absolutely new for him, and why should you 
desire to do again what has been done already ? 
If it be a poem, the reviewer's head already rings 
with the whole gamut of the world's metrical music ; 
he can recognize any simile, recall all turns of 
phrase, match every sentiment ; why seek to please 
him anew with old things? If it concern itself 
with the philosophy of politics, he can and will set 
himself to test it by the whole history of its kind 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 41 

from Plato down to Benjamin Kidd. How can it 
but spoil your sincerity to know that your critic 
will know everything? Will you not be tempted 
of the devil to anticipate his judgment or his pre- 
tensions by pretending to know as much as he ? 

The hterature of creation naturally falls into two 
kinds : that which interprets nature or human ac- 
tion, and that which interprets seK, Both of these 
may have the flavor of immortality, but neither 
unless it be free from, self -consciousness. No man, 
therefore, can create after the best manner in either 
of these kinds who is an habitue of the circles 
made so delightful by those interesting men, the 
modern literati, sophisticated in all the fashions, 
ready in all the catches of the knowing literary 
world which centres in the city and the university. 
He cannot always be simple and straightforward. 
He cannot be always and without pretension him- 
self, bound by no other man's canons of taste in 
speech or conduct. In the judgment of such cir- 
cles there is but one thing for you to do if you 
would gain distinction : you must " beat the rec- 
ord ; " you must do certain definite literary feats 
better than they have yet been done. You are 
pitted against the literary " field." You are has- 
tened into the paralysis of comparing yourself with 
others, and thus away from the health of unhesi- 



42 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

tating seK-expression and directness of first-hand 
vision. i> 

It would be not a little profitable if we could 
make correct analysis of the proper relations of 
learning — learning of the critical, accurate sort — 
to origination, of learning's place in literature. 
Although learning is never the real parent of liter- 
ature, but only sometimes its foster-father, and al- 
though the native promptings of soul and sense are 
its best and freshest sources, there is always the 
danger that learning will claim, in every court of 
taste which pretends to jurisdiction, exclusive and 
preeminent rights as the guardian and preceptor 
of authors. An effort is constantly being made to 
create and maintain standards of literary worldli- 
ness, if I may coin such a phrase. The thorough 
man of the world affects to despise natural feeling ; 
does at any rate actually despise all displays of 
it. He has an eye always on his world's best man- 
ners, whether native or imported, and is at contin- 
ual pains to be master of the conventions of society ; 
he will mortify the natural man as much as need 
be in order to be in good form. What learned 
criticism essays to do is to create a similar literary 
worldliness, to establish fashions and conventions in 
letters. O 

I have an odd friend in one of the northern coun- 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 43 

cies of Georgia, — a county set off by itself among 
the mountains, but early foimd out by refined people 
in search of summer refuge from the unhealthful 
air of the southern coast. He belongs to an excel- 
lent family of no little culture, but he was sur- 
prised in the midst of his early schooling by the 
coming on of the war ; and education given pause 
in such wise seldom begins again in the schoolso 
He was left, therefore, to *' finish " his mind as 
best he might in the companionship of the books in 
his uncle's library. These books were of the old 
sober sort : histories, volumes of travels, treatises 
on laws and constitutions, theologies, philosophies 
more fanciful than the romances encased in neigh- 
bor volumes on another shelf. But they were books 
which were used to being taken down and read ; 
they had been daily companions to the rest of the 
family, and they became familiar companions to my 
friend's boyhood. He went to them day after day, 
because theirs was the only society offered him in 
the lonely days when uncle and brothers were at 
the war, and the women were busy about the tasks 
of the home. How literally did he make those 
delightful old volumes his familiars, his cronies ! 
He never dreamed the while, however, that he was 
becoming learned ; it never seemed to occur to him 
that everybody else did not read just as he did, in just 



44 THE AUTHOB HIMSELF. 

such a library. He found out afterwards, of course, 
that he had kept much more of such company than 
had the men with whom he loved to chat at the 
post-office or around the fire in the village shops, 
the habitual resorts of all who were socially in- 
clined; but he attributed that to lack of time on 
their part, or to accident, and has gone on thinking 
until now that all the books that come within his 
reach are the natural intimates of man. And so 
you shall hear him, in his daily familiar talk with 
his neighbors, draw upon his singular stores of wise, 
quaint learning with the quiet colloquial assurance, 
" They tell me," as if books contained current 
rumor ; and quote the poets with the easy unaffect- 
edness with which others cite a common maxim of 
the street ! He has been heard to refer to Dr. 
Arnold of Rugby as " that school teacher over there 
in England." 

Surely one may treasure the image of this 
simple, genuine man of learning as the image of a 
sort of masterpiece of Nature in her own type of 
erudition, a perfect sample of the kind of learning 
that might beget the very highest sort of literature ; 
the literature, namely, of authentic individuahty. It 
is only under one of two conditions that learning 
will not dull the edge of individuality : first, if one 
never suspect that it is creditable and a matter of 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 45 

pride to be learned, and so never become learned 
for the sake of becoming so ; or, second, if it never 
suggest to one tliat investigation is better than 
reflection. Learned investigation leads to many 
good things, but one of these is not great litera- 
ture, because learned investigation commands, as 
the first condition of its success, the repression of 
individuality. 

His mind is a great comfort to every man who 
has one ; but a heart is not often to be so conven- 
iently possessed. Hearts frequently give trouble ; 
they are straightforward and impulsive, and can 
seldom be induced to be prudent. They must be 
schooled before they will become insensible ; .they 
must be coached before they can be made to care 
first and most for themselves : and in aU cases the 
mind must be their schoolmaster and coach. They 
are irregular forces ; but the mind may be trained 
to observe all points of circumstance and all mo- 
tives of occasion. 

No doubt it is considerations of this nature that 
must be taken to explain the fact that our univer- 
sities are erected entirely for the service of the 
tractable mind, while the heart's only education 
must be gotten from association with its neighbor 
heart, and in the ordinary courses of the world. 
Life is its only university. Mind is monarch, 



46 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF, 

whose laws claim supremacy in those lands which 
boast the movements of civilization, and it must 
command all the instrumentalities of education. 
At least such is the theory of the constitution of 
the modern world. It is to be suspected that, as a 
matter of fact, mind is one of those modern monarchs 
who reign, but do not govern. That old House of 
Commons, that popular chamber in which the pas- 
sions, the prejudices, the inborn, unthinking affec- 
tions long ago repudiated by mind, have their full 
representation, controls much the greater part of 
the actual conduct of affairs. To come out of the 
figure, reasoned thought is, though perhaps the pre- 
siding, not yet the regnant force in the world. In 
life and in literature it is subordinate. The future 
may belong to it ; but the present and past do not. 
Faith and virtue do not wear its livery ; friendship, 
loyalty, patriotism, do not derive their motives from 
it. It does not furnish the material for those masses 
of habit, of unquestioned tradition, and of treasured 
belief which are the ballast of every steady ship of 
state, enabling it to spread its sails safely to the 
breezes of progress, and even to stand before the 
storms of revolution. And this is a fact which 
has its reflection in literature. There is a litera- 
ture of reasoned thought ; but by far the greater 
part of those writings which we reckon worthy of 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 47 

that great name is the product, not of reasoned 
thought, but of the imagination and of the spiritual 
vision of those who see, — writings winged, not 
with knowledge, but with sympathy, with sentiment, 
with heartiness. Even the literature of reasoned 
thought gets its life, not from its logic, but from 
the spirit, the insight, and the inspiration which 
are the vehicle of its logic. Thought presides, but 
sentiment has the executive powers ; the motive 
functions belong to feeling. 

" Many people give many theories of literary 
composition," says the most natural and stimula^ 
ting of English critics, "and Dr. Blair, whom we 
will read, is sometimes said to have exhausted the 
subject ; but, unless he has proved the contrary, 
we beheve that the knack in style is to write like a 
human being. Some think they must be wise, 
some elaborate, some concise ; Tacitus wrote like a 
pair of stays ; some startle us, as Thomas Carlyle, 
or a comet, inscribing with his tail. But legibility 
is given to those who neglect these notions, and are 
willing to be themselves, to write their own thoughts 
in their own words, in the simplest words, in the 
words wherein they were thought. . . . Books are 
for various purposes, — tracts to teach, almanacs to 
sell, poetry to make pastry ; but this is the rarest sort 
of a book, — a book to read. As Dr. Johnson 



48 THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 

said, ' Sir, a good book is one you can hold in your 
hand, and take to the fire.' Now there are ex- 
tremely few books which can, with any propriety, 
be so treated. When a great author, as Grote or 
Gibbon, has devoted a whole life of horrid industry 
to the composition of a large history, one feels one 
ought not to touch it with a mere hand, — it is not 
respectful. The idea of slavery hovers over the 
Decline and Fall. Fancy a stifEy dressed gentleman, 
in a stiff chair, slowly writing that stiff compilation 
in a stiff hand ; it is enough to stiffen you for life." 
It is devoutly to be wished that we might learn to 
prepare the best soils for mind, the best associa- 
tions and companionships, the least possible sophis- 
tication. We are busy enough nowadays finding 
out the best ways of fertilizing and stimulating 
mind ; but that is not quite the same thing as dis- 
covering the best soils for it, and the best atmo- 
spheres. Our culture is, by erroneous preference, 
of the reasoning faculty, as if that were all of us. 
Is it not the instinctive discontent of readers seek- 
ing stimulating contact with authors that has given 
us the present almost passionately spoken dissent 
from the standards set themselves by the realists in 
fiction, dissatisfaction with mere recording or ob- 
servation ? And is not realism working out upon 
itself the revenge its enemies would fain compass ? 



THE AUTHOR HIMSELF. 49 

Must not all April Hopes exclude from their num- 
ber the hope of immortality? 

The rule for every man is, not to depend on the 
education which other men prepare for him, — not 
even to consent to it ; but to strive to see things as 
they are, and to be himseK as he is. Defeat lies 
in seK-surrender. d 



m. 

ON AN author's choice OF COMPANY. 

Once and again, it would seem, a man is born into 
the world belated. Strayed out of a past age, he 
comes among us like an alien, lives removed and 
singular, and dies a stranger. There was a touch 
of this strangeness in Charles Lamb. Much as he 
was loved and befriended, he was not much under- 
stood ; for he drew aloof in his studies, affected 
a " self -pleasing quaintness " in his style, took no 
pains to hit the taste of his day, wandered at sweet 
liberty in an age which could scarcely have bred 
such another. " Hang the age ! " he cried. " I 
will write for antiquity." And he did. He wrote 
as if it were still Shakespeare's day; made the 
authors of that spacious time his constant compan- 
ions and study; and deliberately became himself 
" the last of the Elizabethans." When a new book 
came out, he said, he always read an old one. 

The case ought, surely, to put us occasionally 
upon reflecting. May an author not, in some de- 
gree, by choosing his literary company, choose also 
his literary character, and so, when he comes to 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 51 

write, write himself back to his masters ? May he 
not, by examining his own tastes and yielding him- 
self obedient to his natural affinities, join what con- 
genial group of writers he will? The question can 
be argued very strongly in the affirmative, and 
that not alone because of Charles Lamb's case. It 
might be said that Lamb was antique only in the 
forms of his speech ; that he managed very clev- 
erly to hit che taste of his age in the substance of 
what he wrote, for all the phraseology had so strong 
a flavor of quaintness and was not at all in the 
mode of the day. It would not be easy to prove 
that ; but it really does not matter. In his tastes, 
certainly. Lamb was an old author, not a new one ; 
a "modern antique," as Hood called him. He 
wrote for his own age, of course, because there was 
no other age at hand to write for, and the age he 
liked best was past and gone ; but he wrote what 
he fancied the great generations gone by would 
have liked, and what, as it has turned out in the 
generosity of fortune, subsequent ages have warmly 
loved and reverently canonized him for writing ; as 
if there were a casual taste that belongs to a day and 
generation, and also a permanent taste which is 
without date, and he had hit the latter. 

Great authors are not often men of fashion. 
Fashion is always a harness and restraint, whether 



52 AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 

it be fasMon in dress or fashion in vice or fasMon 
in literary art ; and a man who is bound by it is 
caught and formed in a fleeting mode. The great 
writers are always innovators ; for they are always 
frank, natural, and downright, and frankness and 
naturalness always disturb, when they do not wholly 
break down, the fixed and complacent order of 
fashion. No genuine man can be deliberately in 
the fashion, indeed, in what he says, if he have any 
movement of thought or individuality in him. He 
remembers what Aristotle says, or if he does not, 
his own pride and manliness fill him with the 
thought instead. The very same action that is 
noble if done for the satisfaction of one's own sense 
of right or purpose of self-development, said the 
Stagirite, may, if done to satisfy others, become 
menial and slavish. ^ " It is the object of any action 
or study that is all-important," and if the author's 
chief object be to please he is condemned already. 
The true spirit of authorship is a spirit of liberty 
which scorns the slave's trick of imitation. It is a 
masterful spirit of conquest within the sphere of 
ideas and of artistic form, — an impulse of empire 
and origination. 

Of course a man may choose, if he will, to be 
less than a free author. He may become a reporter ; 
for there is such a thing as reporting for books as 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 53 

well as reporting for newspapers, and there have 
been reporters so amazingly clever that their very 
aptness and wit constitute them a sort of immor- 
tals. You have proof of this in Horace Walpole, 
at whose hands gossip and compliment receive a 
sort of apotheosis. Such men hold the secret of 
a kind of alchemy by which things trivial and tem- 
porary may be transmuted into literature. But 
they are only inspired reporters, after all ; and 
while a man was wishing, he might wish to be more, 
and climb to better company. 

Every man must, of course, whether he will or 
not, feel the spirit of the age in which he lives and 
thinks and does his work ; and the mere contact 
will direct and form him more or less. But to wish 
to serve the spirit of the age at any sacrifice of in- 
dividual naturalness or conviction, however small, 
is to harbor the germ of a destroying disease. 
Every man who writes ought to write for immor- 
tality, even though he be of the multitude that die 
at their graves ; and the standards of immortality 
are of no single age. There are many qualities 
and causes that give permanency to a book, but 
universal vogue during the author's lifetime is not 
one of them. Many authors now immortal have 
enjoyed the applause of their own generations; 
many authors now universally admired will, let us 



64 ^iV^ AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 

hope, pass on to an easy immortality. The praise 
of your own day is no absolute disqualification ; 
but it may be if it be given for qualities which 
your friends are the first to admire, for 't is likely 
they will also be the last. There is a greater 
thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the 
spirit of the ages. It is present in your own day ; 
it is even dominant then, with a sort of accumu- 
lated power and mastery. If you can strike it, 
you wiU strike, as it were, into the upper air of 
your own time, where the forces are which run 
from age to age. Lower down, where you breathe, 
is the more inconstant air of opinion, inhaled, ex- 
haled, from day to day, — the variant currents, the 
forces that will carry you, not forward, but hither 
and thither. 

We write nowadays a great deal with our eyes 
circumspectly upon the tastes of our neighbors, but 
very little with our attention bent upon our own 
natural, self -speaking thoughts and the very truth 
of the matter whereof we are discoursing. Now 
and again, it is true, we are startled to find how 
the age relishes still an old-fashioned romance, if 
written with a new-fashioned vigor and directness ; 
how quaint and simple and lovely things, as well 
as what is altogether modern and analytic and 
painful, bring our most judicious friends crowding, 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 55 

purses in hand, to the book-stalls ; and for a while 
we are puzzled to see worn-out styles and past 
modes revived. But we do not let these thinsfs 
seriously disturb our study of prevailing fashions. 
These books of adventure are not at all, we assure 
ourselves, in the true spirit of the age, with its 
realistic knowledge of what men really do think 
and purpose, and the taste for them must be only 
for the moment or in jest. We need not let our 
surprise at occasional flurries and variations in the 
literary market cloud or discredit our analysis of 
the real taste of the day, or suffer ourselves to be 
betrayed into writing romances, however much we 
might rejoice to be delivered from the drudgery of 
sociological study, and made free to go afield with 
our imaginations upon a joyous search for hidden 
treasure or knightly adventure. 

And yet it is quite likely, after all, that the 
present age is transient. Past ages have been. It 
is probable that the objects and interests now so 
near us, looming dominant in all the foreground 
of our day, will sometime be shifted and lose their 
place in the perspective. That has happened with 
the near objects and exaggerated interests of other 
days, so violently sometimes as to submerge and 
thrust out of sight whole libraries of books. It 
will not do to reckon upon the persistence of new 



66 AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 

things. 'T were best to give them time to make 
trial of the seasons. The old things of art and 
taste and thought are the permanent things. We 
know that they are because they have lasted long 
enough to grow old ; and we deem it safe to assess 
the spirit of the age by the same test. No age 
adds a great deal to what it received from the age 
that went before it; no time gets an air all its 
own. The same atmosphere holds from age to age ; 
it is only the little movements of the air that are 
new. In the intervals when the trades do not 
blow, fleeting cross-winds venture abroad, the which 
if a man wait for he may lose his voyage. 

No man who has anything to say need stop and 
bethink himself whom he may please or displease 
in the saying of it. He has but one day to write 
in, and that is his own. He need not fear that he 
will too much ignore it. He will address the men 
he knows when he writes, whether he be conscious 
of it or not ; he may dismiss all fear on that score 
and use his liberty to the utmost. There are some 
things that can have no antiquity and must ever be 
without date, and genuineness and spirit are of 
their number. A man who has these must ever 
be " timely," and at the same time fit to last, if he 
can get his qualities into what he writes. He may 
freely read, too, what he will that is congenial, and 



AN AUTHORS COMPANY. bl 

form himself by companionships that are chosen 
simply because they are to his taste ; that is, if he 
be genuine and in very truth a man of independent 
spirit. Lamb would have written " for antiquity " 
with a vengeance had his taste for the quaint 
writers of an elder day been an affectation, or 
the authors he liked men themselves affected and 
ephemeral. No age this side antiquity would ever 
have vouchsafed him a glance or a thought. But 
it was not an affectation, and the men he pre- 
ferred were as genuine and as spirited as he was. 
He was simply obeying an affinity and taking 
cheer after his own kind. A man born into the 
real patriciate of letters may take his pleasure in 
what company he will without taint or loss of 
caste ; may go confidently abroad in the free 
world of books and choose his comradeships with- 
out fear of offense. 

More than that, there is no other way in which 
he can form himself, if he would have his power 
transcend a single age. He belittles himself who 
takes from the world no more than he can get 
from the speech of his own generation. The only 
advantage of books over speech is that they may 
hold from generation to generation, and reach, not 
a small group merely, but a multitude of men ; 
and a man who writes without being a man of 



68 ^iV AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 

letters is curtailed of his heritage. It is in this 
world of old and new that he must form himself if 
he would in the end belong to it and increase its 
bulk of treasure. If he has conned the new theo- 
ries of society, but knows nothing of Burke ; the 
new notions about fiction, and has not read his 
Scott and his Kichardson ; the new criminology, 
and wots nothing of the old human nature ; the new 
religions, and has never felt the power and sanc- 
tity of the old, it is much the same as if he had 
read Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and had never opened 
Shakespeare. How is he to know wholesome air 
from foul, good company from bad, visions from 
nightmares ? He has framed himseK for the great 
art and handicraft of letters only when he has 
taken all the human parts of literature as if they 
were without date, and schooled himseK in a cath- 
oHc sanity of taste and judgment. <5 

Then he may very safely choose what company 
his own work shall be done in, — in what manner, 
and under what masters. He cannot choose amiss 
for himself or for his generation if he choose like a 
man, without light whim or weak affectation ; not 
like one who chooses a costume, but like one who 
chooses a character. What is it, let him ask hun- 
seK, that renders a bit of writing a " piece of 
literature " ? It is reality. A " wood-note wild," 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 59 

sung unpremeditated and out of the heart ; a de- 
scription written as if with an undimmed and 
seeing eye upon the very object described; an 
exposition that lays bare the very soul of the 
matter ; a motive truly revealed ; anger that is 
righteous and justly spoken ; mirth that has its 
sources pure ; phrases to find the heart of a thing, 
and a heart seen in things for the phrases to find ; 
an unaffected meanmg set out in language that is 
its own, — such are the realities of literature. 
Nothing else is of the kin. Phrases used for their 
own sake ; borrowed meanings which the borrower 
does not truly care for ; an affected manner ; an 
acquired style ; a hollow reason ; words that are 
not fit ; things which do not live when spoken, — <^^ 
these are its falsities, which die in the handling. 

The very top breed of what is unreal is begot- 
ten by imitation. Imitators succeed sometimes, 
and flourish, even while a breath may last ; but 
" imitate and be damned " is the inexorable 
threat and prophecy of fate with regard to the 
permanent fortunes of literature. That has been 
notorious this long time past. It is more worth 
noting, lest some should not have observed it, that 
there are other and subtler ways of producing 
what is unreal. There are the mixed kinds of 
writing, for example. Argument is real if it come 



60 AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 

vital from the mind ; narrative is real if the thing 
told have life and the narrator unaffectedly see it 
while he speaks ; but to narrate and argue in the 
same breath is naught. Take, for instance, the 
familiar example of the early history of Rome. 
Make up your mind what was the truth of the 
matter, and then, out of the facts as you have disen- 
tangled them, construct a firmly touched narrative, 
and the thing you create is real, has the confidence 
and consistency of life. But mix the narrative 
with critical comment upon other writers and their 
variant versions of the tale, show by a nice elabo- 
ration of argument the whole conjectural basis of 
the stor}'', set your reader the double task of doubt- 
ing and accepting, rejecting and constructing, and 
at once you have touched the whole matter with 
unreality. The narrative by itself might have had 
an objective validity ; the argument by itself an 
intellectual firmness, sagacity, vigor, that would 
have sufficed to make and keep it potent ; but 
together they confound each other, destroy each 
other's atmosphere, make a double miscarriage. 
The story is rendered unlikely, and the argument 
obscure. This is the taint which has touched all 
our recent historical writing. The critical discus- 
sion and assessment of the sources of information, 
which used to be a thing for the private mind of 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 61 

the writer, now so encroach upon the open text 
that the story, for the sake of which we would be- 
lieve the whole thing was undertaken, is often- 
times fain to sink away into the foot-notes. The 
process has ceased to be either pure exegesis or 
straightforward narrative, and history has ceased 
to be literature. 

Nor is this our only sort of mixed writing. 
Our novels have become sociological studies, our 
poems vehicles of criticism, our sermons political 
manifestos. We have confounded all processes in 
a common use, and do not know what we would be 
at. "We can find no better use for Pegasus than 
to carry our vulgar burdens, no higher key for 
song than questionings and complainings. Fancy 
pulls in harness with intellectual doubt; enthusi- 
asm walks apologetically alongside science. We 
try to make our very dreams engines of social re- 
form. It is a parlous state of things for literature, 
and it is high time authors should take heed what 
company they keep. The trouble is, they aU want 
to be " in society," overwhelmed with invitations 
from the pubhshers, weU known and talked about 
at the clubs, named every day in the newspapers, 
photographed for the news-stalls ; and it is so hard 
to distinguish between fashion and form, costume 
and substance, convention and truth, the things 



62 AN AUTHOB'S COMPANY. 

that show well and the things that last well; so 
hard to draw away from the writers that are new 
and talked about and note those who are old and 
walk apart, to distinguish the tones which are 
merely loud from the tones that are genuine, to 
get far enough away from the press and the hub- 
bub to see and judge the movements of the crowd ! 
Some will do it. Choice spirits will arise and 
make conquest of us, not "in society," but with 
what will seem a sort of outlawry. The great 
growths of literature spring up in the open, where 
the air is free and they can be a law unto them- 
selves. The law of life, here as elsewhere, is the 
law of nourishment: with what was the earth 
laden, and the atmosphere ? Literatures are re- 
newed, as they are originated, by uncontrived im- 
pulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in 
the mind. Once conceive the matter so, and 
Lamb's quaint saying assumes a sort of gentle 
majesty. A man should " write for antiquity " as 
a tree grows into the ancient air, — this old air 
that has moved upon the face of the world ever 
since the day of creation, which has set the law of 
life to all things, which has nurtured the forests 
and won the flowers to their perfection, which has 
fed men's lungs with life, sped their craft upon the 
seas, borne abroad their songs and their cries, 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 63 

blown their forges to flame, and buoyed up what- 
ever they have contrived. 'T is a common medium, 
though a various life ; and the figure may serve 
the author for instruction. 

The breeding of authors is no doubt a very 
occult thing, and no man can set the rules of it ; 
but at least the sort of " ampler ether " in which 
they are best brought to maturity is known. Writ- 
ers have liked to speak of the Republic of Letters, 
as if to mark their freedom and equality ; but 
there is a better phrase, namely, the Community 
of Letters ; for that means intercourse and com- 
radeship and a life in common. Some take up 
their abode in it as if they had made no search for 
a place to dwell in, but had come into the freedom 
of it by blood and birthright. Others buy the 
freedom with a great price, and seek out all the 
sights and privileges of the place with an eager 
thoroughness and curiosity. Still others win their 
way into it with a certain grace and aptitude, next 
best to the ease and dignity of being born to the 
right. But for all it is a bonny place to be. Its 
comradeships are a liberal education. Some, in- 
deed, even there, live apart ; but most run always 
in the market-place to know what all the rest have 
said. Some keep special company, while others 
keep none at all. But all feel the atmosphere and 
life of the place in their several degrees. 



L 



64 AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 

No doubt there are national groups, and Shake- 
speare is king among the English, as Homer is 
among the Greeks, and sober Dante among his 
gay countrymen. But their thoughts all have in 
common, though speech divide them ; and sov- 
ereignty does not exclude comradeship or embarrass 
freedom. No doubt there is many a wiUful, un- 
governed fellow endured there without question, 
and many a churlish cynic, because he possesses 
that patent of genuineness or of a wit which 
strikes for the heart of things, which, without 
further test, secures citizenship in that free com- 
pany. What a gift of tongues is there, and of 
prophecy ! What strains of good talk, what coun- 
sel of good judgment, what cheer of good tales, 
what sanctity of silent thought ! The sight-seers 
who pass through from day to day, the press of 
voluble men at the gates, the affectation of citizen- 
ship by mere sojourners, the folly of those who 
bring new styles or affect old ones, the procession 
of the generations, disturb the calm of that serene 
conununity not a whit. They will entertain a 
man a whole decade, if he happen to stay so long, 
though they know all the while he can have no 
permanent place among them. 

'T would be a vast gain to have the laws of that 
community better known than they are. Even the 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 65 

first principles of its constitution are singularly 
unfamiliar. It is not a community of writers, but 
a community of letters. One gets admission, not 
because he writes, — write lie never so cleverly, like 
a gentleman and a man of wit, — but because lie is 
literate, a true initiate into the secret craft and 
mystery of letters. What that secret is a man 
may know, even though he cannot practice or ap- 
propriate it. If a man can see the permanent ele- 
ment in things, — the true sources of laughter, the 
real fountains of tears, the motives that strike 
along the main lines of conduct, the acts which dis- 
play the veritable characters of men, the trifles that 
are significant, the details that make the mass, — 
if he know these things, and can also choose words 
with a like knowledge of their power to illuminate 
and reveal, give color to the eye and passion to the 
thought, the secret is his, and an entrance to that 
immortal communion. 

It may be that some learn the mystery of that 
insight without tutors ; but most must put them- 
selves under governors and earn their initiation. 
While a man lives, at any rate, he can keep the 
company of the masters whose words contain the 
mystery and open it to those who can see, almost 
with every accent ; and in such company it may at 
last be revealed to him, — so plainly that he may. 



66 AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY, 

if lie will, still linger in such eomradesliip when he 
is dead. 

It would seem that there are two tests which 
admit to that company, and that they are conclu- 
sive. The one is. Are you individual ? the other, 
Are you conversable ? "I beg pardon,'' said a 
grave wag, coming face to face with a small per- 
son of most consequential air, and putting glass to 
eye in calm scrutiny — "I beg pardon ; but are you 
anybody in particular ? " Such is very much the 
form of initiation into the permanent communion 
of the realm of letters. Tell them, No, but that 
you have done much better — you have caught the 
tone of a great age, studied taste, divined oppor- 
tunity, courted and won a vast public, been most 
timely and most famous ; and you shall be pained 
to find them laughing in your face. Tell them you 
are earnest, sincere, consecrate to a cause, an 
apostle and reformer, and they will still ask you, 
" But are you anybody in particular? " They will 
mean, " Were you your own man in what you 
thought, and not a puppet ? Did you speak with 
an individual note and distinction that marked you 
able to think as well as to speak, — to be yourself 
in thoughts and in words also ? " " Very well, 
then ; you are welcome enough." 

" That is, if you be also conversable." It is 



AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 67 

plain enough what they mean by that, too. They 
mean, if you have spoken in such speech and spirit 
as can be understood from age to age, and not in 
the pet terms and separate spirit of a single day 
and generation. Q Can the old authors understand 
you, that you would associate with them? Will 
men be able to take your meaning in the differing 
days to come ? Or is it perishable matter of the 
day that you deal m — little controversies that 
carry no lasting principle at their heart ; experi- 
mental theories of life and science, put forth for 
their novelty and with no test of their worth ; pic- 
tures, in which fashion looms very large, but human 
nature shows very small ; things that please every- 
body, but instruct no one ; mere fancies that are 
an end in themselves ? Be you never so clever an 
artist in words and in ideas, if they be not the 
words that wear and mean the same thing, and 
that a thing intelligible, from age to age, the ideas 
that shall hold valid and luminous in whatever day 
or company, you may clamor at the gate till your 
lungs fail and get never an answer. 

For that to what you seek admission is a verita- 
ble " community." In it you must be able to be, 
and to remain, conversable. How are you to test 
your preparation meanwhile, unless you look to 
your comradeships now while yet it is time to 



68 AN AUTHOR'S COMPANY. 

learn ? Frequent the company in whicli you may 
learn the speech and the manner which are fit to 
last. Take to heart the admirable example you 
shall see set you there of using speech and manner 
to speak your real thought and be genuinely and 
simply yourself. . 



IV. 

A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 

" Literary politician " is not a label much in 
vogue, and may need first of all a justification, lest 
even the man of whom I am about to speak should 
decline it from his very urn. I do not mean a 
politician who affects literature ; who seems to ap- 
preciate the solemn moral purpose of Wordsworth's 
Happy Warrior, and yet is opposed to ballot re- 
form. Neither do I mean a literary man who 
affects politics ; who earns his victories through 
the publishers, and his defeats at the hands of the 
men who control the primaries. I mean the man 
who has the genius to see deep into affairs, and the 
discretion to keep out of them, — the man to whom, 
by reason of knowledge and imagination and sym- 
pathetic insight, governments and policies are as 
open books, but who, instead of trying to put hap- 
hazard characters of his own into those books, 
wisely prefers to read their pages aloud to others. 
A man this who knows polities, and yet does not 
handle policies. 



70 A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 

There is, no doubt, a very widespread skepticism 
as to the existence of such a man. Many people 
would ask you to prove him as well as define him ; 
and that, as they assume, upon a very obvious 
principle. It is a rule of universal acceptance in 
theatrical circles that no one can write a good play 
who has no practical acquaintance with the stage. 
A knowledge of greenroom possibilities and of 
stage machinery, it is held, must go before all suc- 
cessful attempts to put either passion or humor 
into action on the boards, if pit and gallery are to 
get a sense of reality from the performance. No 
wonder that Sheridan's plays were effective, for 
Sheridan was both author and actor; but abun- 
dant wonder that simple Goldsmith succeeded with 
his exquisite " She Stoops to Conquer," — unless 
we are to suppose that an Irishman of the last cen- 
tury, like the Irishman of this, had some sixth 
sense which enabled him to understand other peo- 
ple's business better than his own ; for poor Gold- 
smith could not act (even off the stage), and his 
only connection with the theatre seems to have been 
his acquaintance with Garrick. Lytton, we know, 
had Macready constantly at his elbow, to give and 
enforce suggestions calculated to render plays play- 
able. And in our own day, the authors of what 
we indulgently call " dramatic literature " find 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN, 71 

themselves constantly obliged to turn tragedies into 
comedies, comedies into farces, to satisfy the man- 
agers ; for managers know the stage, and pretend to 
know all possible audiences also. The writer for 
the stage must be playwright first, author second. 

Similar principles of criticism are not a little 
affected by those who play the parts, gi'eat and small, 
on the stage of politics. There is on that stage, 
too, it is said, a complex machinery of action and 
scene-shifting, a greenroom tradition and practice 
as to costimie and make-up, as to entry and exit, 
necessities of concession to footlights and of appeal 
to the pit, quite as rigorous and quite as proper for 
study as are the concomitants of that other art 
which we frankly caU acting. This is an idea, 
indeed, accepted in some quarters outside the politi- 
cal playhouse as well as within it. Mr. Sydney 
Colvin, for example, declares very rightly that : — 

" Men of letters and of thought are habitually 
too much given to declaiming at their ease against 
the delinquencies of men of action and affairs. The 
inevitable friction of practical politics," he argues, 
" generates heat enough already, and the office of 
the thinker and critic should be to supply not heat, 
but light. The difficulties which attend his own 
unmolested task — the task of seeking after and 
proclaiming salutary truths — should teach him to 



72 A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 

make allowance for the far more urgent difficulties 
which beset the politican ; the man obliged, amidst 
the clash of interests and temptations, to practice 
from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most un- 
certain and at the same time the most indispensable 
of the experimental arts." 

Mr. Colvin is himself of the class of men of let- 
ters and of thought ; he accordingly puts the case 
against his class much more mildly than the practi- 
cal politician would desire to see it put. Practical 
politicians are wont to regard closeted writers upon 
pohtics with a certain condescension, dashed with 
slight traces of uneasy concern. " Literary men 
can say strong things of their age," observes Mr. 
Bagehot, " for no one expects that they will go out 
and act on them. They are a kind of ticket-of- 
leave lunatics, from whom no harm is for the mo- 
ment expected ; who seem quiet, but on whose 
vagaries a practical public must have its eye." 
I suppose that the really serious, practical man 
in politics would see nothing of satirical humor in 
such a description. He would have you note that, 
although traced with a sharp point of wit, the pic- 
ture is nevertheless true. He can cite you a score 
of instances illustrative of the danger of putting 
faith in the political judgments of those who are 
not politicians bred in the shrewd and moving 
world of political management. 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN, 73 

The genuine practical politician, such as (even 
our enemies being the witnesses) we must be ac- 
knowledged to produce in gi-eat numbers and per- 
fection in this country, reserves his acidest con- 
tempt for the literary man who assumes to utter 
judgments touching public affairs and pohtical in- 
stitutions. If he be a reading man, as will some- 
times happen, he is able to point you, in illustration 
of what you are to expect in such cases, to the very 
remarkable essays of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold 
on parhamentary policy and the Irish question. If 
he be not a reading man, as sometimes happens, he 
is able to ask, much to your confusion, " What 
does a feUow who lives inside a library know about 
politics, anyhow? " You have to admit, if you are 
candid, that most fellows who live in libraries know 
little enough. You remember Macaulay, and 
acknowledge that, although he made admirable 
speeches in Parliament, held high political office, 
and knew all the considerable public men of his 
time, he did imagine the creation to have been made 
in accordance with Whig notions ; did hope to find 
the judgments of Lord Somers some day answer- 
ing mankind as standards for all possible times and 
circumstances. You recall Gibbon, and allow, to 
your own thought at least, that, had he not remained 
silent in his seat, a very few of his sentences would 



74 A LITEM ARY POLITICIAN. 

probably have sufficed to freeze the House of Com- 
mons stiff. The ordinary literary man, even though 
he be an eminent historian, is ill enough fitted to be 
a mentor in affairs of government. For, it must 
be admitted, things are for the most part very sim- 
ple in books, and in practical life very complex. 
Not all the bindings of a library inclose the various 
world of circumstance. 

But the practical politician should discrimi- 
nate. Let him find a man with an imagination 
which, though it stands alo6f , is yet quick to con- 
ceive the very things in the thick of which the poli- 
tician struggles. To that man he should resort for 
instruction. And that there is occasionally such 
a man we have proof in Bagehot, the man who 
first clearly distinguished the facts of the English 
constitution from its theory. 

Walter Bagehot is a name known to not a few 
of those who have a zest for the juiciest things of 
literature, for the wit that illuminates and the 
knowledge that refreshes. But his fame is still 
singularly disproportioned to his charm ; and one 
feels once and again like publishing him, at least 
to all spirits of his own kind. It would be a most 
agreeable good fortune to introduce Bagehot to men 
who have not read him ! To ask your friend to 
know Bagehot is like inviting him to seek pleasure. 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 75 

Occasionally, a man is born into the world whose 
mission it evidently is to clarify the thought of 
his generation, and to vivify it ; to give it speed 
where it is slow, vision where it is blind, balance 
where it is out of poise, saving humor where it is 
dry, — and such a man was Walter Bagehot. 
When he wrote of history, he made it seem hmnan 
and probable ; when he wrote of political economy, 
he made it seem credible, entertaining, — nay, en- 
gaging even ; when he wrote criticism, he wrote 
sense. You have in him a man who can jest to 
your instruction, who will beguile you into being 
informed beyond your wont and wise beyond your 
birthright. Full of manly, straightforward mean- 
ing, earnest to find the facts that guide and 
strengthen conduct, a lover of good men and seers, 
full of knowledge and a consuming desire for it, 
he is yet genial withal, with the geniality of a man 
of wit, and alive in every fibre of him, with a life 
he can communicate to you. One is constrained to 
agree, almost, with the verdict of a witty country- 
man of his, who happily still lives to cheer us, that 
when Bagehot died he " carried away into the next 
world more originality of thought than is now to 
be foimd in the three Estates of the Realm." 

An epitome of Bagehot' s life can be given very 
briefly. He was born in February, 1826, and 



76 A LITER ABY POLITICLL^^, 

died in March, 1877, — the month in which one 
would prefer to die. Between those two dates he had 
much quaint experience as a boy, and much sober 
busiaess experience as a man. He wrote essays 
on poets, prose writers, statesmen, whom he would, 
with abundant insight, but without too much re- 
spect of persons ; also books on banking, on the 
early development of society, and on English poli- 
tics, kindling a flame of interest with these dry 
materials such as made men stare who had often de- 
scribed the facts of society themselves, but who had 
never dreamed of applying fire to them, as Bagehot 
did, to make them give forth light and wholesome 
heat. He set the minds of a few fortunate friends 
aglow with the delights of the very wonderful tongue 
which nature had given him through his mother. 
And then he died, while his power was yet young. 
Not a Hf e of event or adventure, but a Hf e of deep 
interest, none the less, because a life in which those 
two things of our modern life, commonly deemed 
incompatible, business and literature, namely, were 
combined without detriment to either ; and from 
which, more interesting still, poHtics gained a pro- 
found expounder in one who was no politician and 
no party man, but, as he himseK said, " between 
sizes in politics." 

Mr. Bagehot was bom in the centre of Somer- 



A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 77 

setshire, that southwestern county of old England 
whose coast towns look across Bristol Channel to 
the higlilands of Wales : a county of small farms, 
and pastures that keep their promise of fatness to 
many generous milkers ; a county broken into ab- 
rupt hills, and sodden moors hardly kept from the 
inroads of the sea, as well as rural valleys open to 
the sun ; a county visited by mists from the sea, 
and bathed in a fine soft atmosphere all its own ; 
visited also by people of fashion, for it contains 
Bath ; visited now also by those who have read 
Lorna Doone, for within it lies part of that Ex- 
moor Forest in which stalwart John Ridd lived 
and wrought his mighty deeds of strength and 
love : a land which the Celts kept for long against 
both Saxon and Roman, but which Christianity 
easily conquered, building Wells Cathedral and 
the monastery at Glastonbury. Nowhere else, in 
days of travel, could Bagehot find a land of so 
great delight save in the northwest corner of Spain, 
where a golden light lay upon everything, where 
the sea shone with a rare, soft lustre, and where 
there was a like varied coast-line to that he knew 
and loved at home. He called it " a sort of better 
Devonshire : " and Devonshire is Somersetshire, — 
only more so ! The atmospheric effects of his 
county certainly entered the boy Bagehot, and 



78 A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 

colored the nature of the man. He had its 
glow, its variety, its richness, and its imaginative 
depth. 

But better than a fair county is a good parent- 
age, and that, too, Bagehot had ; just the parentage 
one would wish to have who desired to be a force 
in the world's thought. His father, Thomas Wat- 
son Bagehot, was for thirty years managing director 
and vice-president of Stuckey's Banking Company, 
one of the oldest and best of those sturdy joint-stock 
companies which have for so many years stood 
stoutly up alongside the Bank of England as 
managers of the vast English fortune. But he 
was something more than a banker. He was a man 
of mind, of strong liberal convictions in poHtics, 
and of an abundant knowledge of English history 
wherewith to back up his opinions. He was one 
of the men who think, and who think in straight 
lines ; who see, and see things. His mother 
was a Miss Stuckey, a niece of the founder of 
the banking company. But it was not her con- 
nection with bankers that made her an invaluable 
mother. She had, besides beauty, a most lively 
and stimulating wit ; such a mind as we most de- 
sire to see in a woman, — a mind that stirs with- 
out irritating you, that rouses but does not be- 
labor, amuses and yet subtly instructs. She could 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 79 

preside over the young life of her son in such a way 
as at once to awaken his curiosity and set him in 
the way of satisfying it. She was brilliant com- 
pany for a boy, and rewarding for a man. She 
had suggestive people, besides, among her kinsmen, 
into whose companionsliip she could bring her son. 
Bagehot had that for which no university can ever 
offer an equivalent, — the constant and intelligent 
sympathy of both his parents in his studies, and 
their companionship in his tastes. To liis father's 
strength his mother added vivacity. He would 
have been wise, perhaps, without her ; but he would 
not have been wise so dehghtfully. 

Bagehot got his schooling in Bristol, his uni- 
versity training in London. In Bristol lived Dr. 
Prichard, his mother's brother-in-law, and author 
of a notable book on the Physical History of Men. 
From him Bagehot unquestionably got his bent to- 
wards the study of race origins and development. 
In London, Cobden and Bright were carrying on 
an important part of their great agitation for the 
repeal of the corn laws, and were making such 
speeches as it stirred and bettered young men to 
hear. Bagehot had gone to University Hall, Lon- 
don, rather than to Oxford or Cambridge, because 
his father was a Unitarian, and would not have his 
son submit to the religious tests then required at 



80 A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 

the great universities. But there can be no doubt 
that there was more to be had at University Hall 
in that day than at either Oxford or Cambridge. 
Oxford and Cambridge were still dragging the very 
heavy chains of a hindering tradition ; the faculty 
of University Hall contained many thorough and 
some eminent scholars ; what was more, University 
Hall was in London, and London itself was a 
quickening and inspiring teacher for a lad in love 
with both books and affairs, as Bagehot was. He 
could ask penetrating questions of his professors, 
and he could also ask questions of London, seek 
out her secrets of history, and so experience to the 
full the charm of her abounding life. In after 
years, though he loved Somersetshire and clung to 
it with a strong home-keeping affection, he could 
never stay away from London for more than six 
weeks at a time. Eventually he made it his place 
of permanent residence. 

His university career over, Bagehot did what so 
many thousands of young graduates before him 
had done, — he studied for the bar; and then, 
having prepared himself to practice law, followed 
another large body of young men in deciding to 
abandon it. He joined his father in his business 
as ship-owner and banker in Somersetshire, and 
in due time took his place among the directors of 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 81 

Stuckey's Company. For the rest of his life, this 
man, whom the world knows as a man of letters, 
was first of all a man of business. In his later 
years, however, he identified himself with what may 
be called the literary side of business by becom- 
ing editor of that great financial authority, the 
"London Economist." He had, so to say, married 
into this position. His wife was the daughter of 
the Rt. Hon. James Wilson, who was the mind 
and manager, as well as the founder of the " Econo- 
mist." Wilson's death seemed to leave the great 
financial weekly by natural succession to Bagehot ; 
and certainly natural selection never made a better 
choice. It was under Bagehot that the " Econo- 
mist " became a sort of financial providence for 
business men on both sides of the Atlantic. Its 
sagacious prescience constituted Bagehot himself a 
sort of supplementary chancellor of the exchequer, 
the chancellors of both parties resorting to him 
with equal confidence and solicitude. His constant 
contact with London, and with the leaders of poli- 
tics and opinion there, of course materially assisted 
him also to those penetrating judgments touching 
the structure and working of English institutions 
which have made his volume on the English 
Constitution and his essays on Bolingbroke and 
Brougham and Peel, on Mr. Gladstone and Sir 



82 A LITERAEY POLITICIAN. 

George Cornewall Lewis, the admiration and de- 
spair of all who read them. 

Those who know Bagehot only as the writer of 
some of the most delightful and suggestive literary 
criticisms in the language wonder that he should 
have been an authority on practical politics ; those 
who used to regard the " London Economist " as 
omniscient, and who knew him only as the editor 
of it, marvel that he dabbled in literary criticism, 
and incline to ask themselves, when they learn of 
his vagaries in that direction, whether he can have 
been so safe a guide as they deemed him, after all ; 
those who know him through his political wi'itings 
alone venture upon the perusal of his miscellaneous 
essays with not a little surprise and misgiving that 
their master should wander so far afield. And yet 
the whole Bagehot is the only Bagehot. Each 
part of the man is incomplete, not only, but a trifle 
incomprehensible, also, without the other parts. 
What delights us most in his literary essays is 
their broad practical sagacity, so uniquely married 
as it is with pure taste and the style of a rapid 
artist in words. What makes his financial and 
political writings whole and sound is the scope of 
his mind outside finance and politics, the validity 
of his observation all around the circle of thought 
and affairs. He was the better critic for being a 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 83 

competent man of business and a trusted financial 
authority. He was the more sure-footed in his 
political judgments because of his play of mind in 
other and supplementary spheres of human activity. 
The very appearance of the man was a sort of 
outer index to the singular variety of capacity that 
has made him so notable a figure in the literary 
annals of England. A mass of black, wavy hair ; 
a dark eye, with depths full of slumberous, playful 
fire ; a ruddy skin that bespoke active blood, quick 
in its rounds ; the lithe figure of an excellent horse- 
man ; a nostril full, delicate, quivering, like that of 
a blooded racer, — such were the fitting outward 
marks of a man in whom life and thought and 
fancy abounded ; the aspect of a man of unflagging 
vivacity, of wholesome, hearty humor, of a ready 
intellectual sympathy, of wide and penetrative ob- 
servation. It is no narrow, logical shrewdness or 
cold penetration that looks forth at you through 
that face, even if a bit of mockery does lurk in the 
privatest corner of the eye. Among the quahties 
which he seeks out for special praise in Shake- 
speare is a broad tolerance and sympathy for illog- 
ical and common minds. It seems to him an evi- 
dence of size in Shakespeare that he was not vexed 
with smallness, but was patient, nay, sympathetic 
even, in his portrayal of it. '' If every one were 



84 A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 

logical and literary," he exclaims, " how would there 
be scavengers, or watchmen, or caulkers, or coopers? 
A patient sympathy, a kindly fellow-feeling for the 
narrow intelligence necessarily induced by narrow 
circumstances, — a narrowness which, in some de- 
grees, seems to be inevitable, and is perhaps more 
serviceable than most things to the wise conduct of 
life, — this, though quick and half-bred minds may 
despise it, seems to be a necessary constituent in 
the composition of manifold genius. ' How shall 
the world be served ? ' asks the host in Chaucer. 
We must have cart-horses as weU as race-horses, 
draymen as well as poets. It is no bad thing, after 
all, to be a slow man and to have one idea a year. 
You don't make a figure, perhaps, in argumentative 
society, which requires a quicker species of thought, 
but is that the worse ? " 

One of the things which strike us most in Bage- 
hot himself is his capacity to understand inferior 
minds ; and there can be no better test of sound 
genius. He stood in the midst of affairs, and knew 
the dull duty and humdrum fidelity which make up 
the equipment of the ordinary mind for business, 
for the business which keeps the world steady in 
its grooves and makes it fit for habitation. He 
perceived quite calmly, though with an odd, sober 
amusement, that the world is under the dominion, 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 85 

in most things, of the average man, and the aver- 
age man he knows. He is, he explains, with his 
characteristic covert humor, " a cool, common per- 
son, with a considerate air, with figures in his 
mind, with his own business to attend to, with a 
set of ordinary opinions arising from and suited to 
ordinary hfe. He can't bear novelty or originali- 
ties. He says, ' Sir, I never heard such a thing 
before in my life ; ' and he thinks this a reductio 
ad ahsurdum. You may see his taste by the read- 
ing of which he approves. Is there a more splen- 
did monument of talent and industry than the 
'Times'? No wonder that the average man — 
that any one — believes in it. . . . But did you ever 
see anything there you had never seen before ? . . . 
Where are the deep theories, and the wise axioms, 
and the everlasting sentiments which the writers of 
the most influential publication in the world have 
been the first to communicate to an ignorant spe- 
cies ? Such writers are far too shrewd. . . . The 
purchaser desires an article which he can appreciate 
at sight, which he can lay down and say, ' An 
excellent article, very excellent ; exactly my own 
sentiments.' q Original theories give trouble ; be- 
sides, a grave man on the Coal Exchange does 
not desire to be an apostle of novelties among the 
contemporaneous dealers in fuel ; he wants to be 



86 A LITEBABY POLITICIAN. 

provided with remarks he can make on the topics 
of the day which will not be known not to be his, 
that are not too profound, which he can fancy the 
paper only reminded him of. And just in the 
same way," — thus he proceeds with the sagacious 
moral, — " precisely as the most popular poHtical 
paper is not that which is abstractedly the best or 
most instructive, but that which most exactly takes 
up the minds of men where it finds them, catches 
the floating sentiment of society, puts it in such a 
form as society can fancy would convince another 
society which did not believe, so the most influen- 
tial of constitutional statesmen is the one who most 
felicitously expresses the creed of the moment, who 
administers it, who embodies it in laws and insti- 
tutions, who gives it the highest life it is capable 
of, who induces the average man to think, ' I could 
not have done it any better if I had had time my- 
self/ " 

See how his knowledge of politics proceeds out 
of his knowledge of men. " You may talk of the 
tyranny of Nero and Tiberius," he exclaims, " but 
the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door 
neighbor. What law is so cruel as the law of do- 
ing what he does ? What yoke is so galling as the 
necessity of being like him ? What espionage of 
despotism comes to your door so effectually as the 



A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 87 

eye of the man who lives at your door? Public 
opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts 
obedience to itself ; it requires us to think other 
men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to fol- 
low other men's habits. Of course, if we do not, 
no formal ban issues, no corporeal pain, the coarse 
penalty of a barbarous society, is inflicted on the 
offender, but we are called ' eccentric ; ' there is a 
gentle murmur of ' most unfortunate ideas,' ' singu- 
lar young man,' ' well intentioned, I dare say, but 
unsafe, sir, quite unsafe.' The prudent, of course, 
conform." 

There is, no doubt, a touch of mockery in all 
this, but there is unquestionable insight in it, too, 
and a sane knowledge also of the fact that dull, 
common judgments are, after all, the cement of 
society. It is Bagehot who says somewhere that it 
is only dull nations, like the Romans and the 
English, who can become or remam for any length 
of time self-governing nations, because it is only 
among them that duty is done through lack of 
knowledge sufficient or imagination enough to sug- 
gest anything else to do : only among them that 
the stability of slow habit can be had. 

It would be superficial criticism to put forward 
Bagehot's political opinions as themselves the proof 
of his extraordinary power as a student and analyst 



88 A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 

of institutions. His life, his broad range of study, 
his quick versatility, his shrewd appreciation of 
common men, his excursions through all the fields 
that men traverse in their thought of one another 
and in their contact with the world's business, — 
these are the soil out of which his political judg- 
ments spring, from which they get their sap and 
bloom. In order to know institutions, you must 
know men ; you must be able to imagine histories, 
to appreciate characters radically unlike your own, 
to see into the heart of society and assess its 
notions, great and small. Your average critic, it 
must be acknowledged, would be the worst possible 
commentator on affairs. He has all the movements 
of intelligence without any of its reality. But a 
man who sees authors with a Chaucerian insight 
into them as men, who knows literature as a realm 
of vital thought conceived by real men, of actual 
motive felt by concrete persons, this is a man whose 
opinions you may confidently ask, if not on current 
politics, at any rate on all that concerns the perma^ 
nent relations of men in society. 

It is for such reasons that one must first make 
known the most masterly of the critics of English 
political institutions as a man of catholic tastes and 
attainments, shrewdly observant of many kinds of 
men and affairs. Know him once in this way, and 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 89 

his mastery in political thought is explained. If I 
were to make choice, therefore, of extracts from 
his works with a view to recommend him as a 
politician, I should choose those passages which 
show him a man of infinite capacity to see and un- 
derstand men of all kinds, past and present. By 
showing in his case the equipment of a mind open 
on all sides to the life and thought of society, and 
penetrative of human secrets of many sorts, I 
should authenticate his credentials as a writer upon 
politics, which is nothing else than the public and 
organic life of society. 

Examples may be taken almost at random. 
There is the passage on Sydney Smith, in the essay 
on the First Edinburgh Reviewers. We have all 
laughed with that great-hearted clerical wit ; but 
it is questionable whether we have all appreciated 
him as a man who wrote and wrought wisdom. 
Indeed, Sydney Smith may be made a very delicate 
test of sound judgment, the which to apply to 
friends of whom you are suspicious. There was 
a man beneath those excellent witticisms, a big, 
wholesome, thinking man ; but none save men of 
like wholesome natures can see and value his man- 
hood and his mind at their real worth. 

" Sydney Smith was an after-dinner writer. 
His words have a flow, a vigor, an expression, 



90 A UTEBABY POLITICIAN. 

which is not given to hungry mortals. . . . There 
is little trace of labor in his composition ; it is 
poured forth like an unceasing torrent, rejoicing 
daily to run its course. And what courage there 
is in it ! There is as much variety of pluck in 
writing across a sheet as in riding across a country. 
Cautious men ... go tremulously, like a timid 
rider ; they turn hither and thither ; they do not 
go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind. 
A few sentences are enough for a master of sen- 
tences. The writing of Sydney Smith is suited to 
the broader kind of important questions. For any- 
thing requiring fine nicety of speculation, long elab- 
orateness of deduction, evanescent sharpness of 
distinction, neither his style nor his mind was fit. 
He had no patience for long argument, no acute- 
ness for delicate precision, no fangs for recondite 
research. Writers, like teeth, are divided into in- 
cisors and grinders. Sydney Smith was a molar. 
He did not run a long, sharp argument into the 
interior of a question ; he did not, in the common 
phrase, go deeply into it ; but he kept it steadily 
under the contract of a strong, capable, jawlike 
understanding, — pressing its surface, effacing its 
intricacies, grinding it down. Yet this is done 
without toil. The play of the molar is instinctive 
and placid ; he could not help it ; it would seem 
that he had an enjo3^ment in it." 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 91 

One reads this with a feeling that Bagehot both 
knows and likes Sydney Smith, and heartily ap- 
preciates him as an engine of Whig thought ; and 
with the conviction that Bagehot himself, knowing 
thus and enjoying Smith's freehand method of 
writing, could have done the like himself, — could 
himself have made English ring to all the old Whig 
tunes, like an anvil under the hammer. And yet 
you have only to turn back a page in the same 
essay to find quite another Bagehot, — a Bagehot 
such as Sydney Smith could not have been. He 
is speaking of that other militant Edinburgh re- 
viewer, Lord Jeffrey, and is recalling, as every one 
recalls, Jeffrey's review of Wordsworth's " Excur- 
sion.'* The first words of that review, as every- 
body remembers, were, " This will never do ; " and 
there followed upon those words, though not a 
little praise of the poetical beauties of the poem, a 
thoroughly meant condemnation of the school of 
poets of which Wordsworth was the greatest repre- 
sentative. Very celebrated in the world of litera- 
ture is the leading case of Jeffrey v. Wordsworth. 
It is in summing up this case that Bagehot gives 
us a very different taste of his quality : — 

" The world has given judgment. Both Mr. 
Wordsworth and Lord Jeffrey have received their 
reward. The one had his own generation, the 



92 A LITEBABY POLITICIAN. 

laughter of men, the applause of drawing-rooms, 
the concurrence of the crowd ; the other a succeed- 
ing age, the fond enthusiasm of secret students, the 
lonely rapture of lonely minds. And each has re- 
ceived according to his kind. If all cultivated men 
speak differently because of the existence of Words- 
worth and Coleridge ; if not a thoughtful English 
book has appeared for forty years without some 
trace for good or evil of their influence ; if sermon- 
writers subsist upon their thoughts ; if ' sacred 
poets ' thrive by translating their weaker portions 
into the speech of women ; if, when aU this is over, 
some sufficient part of their writing will ever be 
found fitting food for wild musing and soHtary med- 
itation, surely this is because they possessed the 
inner nature, — ' an intense and glowing mind,' 
' the vision and the faculty divine.' But if, per- 
chance, in their weaker moments, the great authors 
of the ' Lyrical Ballads ' did ever imagine that the 
world was to pause because of their verses, that 
'Peter Bell' would be popular in drawing-rooms, 
that ' Christabel ' would be perused in the city, that 
people of fashion would make a handbook of * The 
Excursion,' it was well for them to be told at 
once that this was not so. Nature ingeniously 
prepared a shrill artificial voice, which spoke in 
season and out of season, enough and more than 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 93 

enougli, what will ever be the idea of the cities of 
the plain concerning those who live alone among the 
mountains, of the frivolous concerning the grave, of 
the gregarious concerning the recluse, of those who 
laugh concerning those who laugh not, of the com- 
mon concerning the uncommon, of those who lend 
on usury concerning those who lend not ; the notion 
of the world of those whom it will not reckon 
among the righteous, — it said, ' This won't do ! ' 
And so in all time will the lovers of polished Lib- 
eralism speak concerning the intense and lonely 
prophet." 

This is no longer the Bagehot who could " write 
across a sheet" with Sydney Smith. It is now 
a Bagehot whose heart is turned away from the 
cudgeling Whigs to see such things as are hidden 
from the bearers of cudgels, and revealed only to 
those who can await in the sanctuary of a quiet 
mind the coming of the vision. 

Single specimens of such a man's writing do not 
suffice, of course, even as specimens. They need 
their context to show their appositeness, the full 
body of the writing from which they are taken to 
show the mass and system of the thought. Even 
separated pieces of his matter prepare us, never- 
theless, for finding in Bagehot keener, juster esti- 
mates of difficult historical and political characters 



94 A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 

than it is given the merely exact historian, with 
his head full of facts, and his heart purged of all 
imagination, to speak. There is his estimate of 
the cavalier, for example : " A cavalier is always 
young. The buoyant life arises before us, rich in 
hope, strong in vigor, irregular in action: men 
young and ardent, ' framed in the prodigality of 
nature ; ' open to every enjoyment, alive to every 
passion, eager, impulsive ; brave without discipline, 
noble without principle ; prizing luxury, despising 
danger ; capable of high sentiment, but in each 
of whom the 

* addiction was to courses vain ; 
His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow ; 
His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports, 
And never noted in him any study, 
Any retirement, any sequestration 
From open haunts and popularity.' 

The political sentiment is part of the character ; 
the essence of Toryism is enjoyment. . . . The way 
to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs ; 
the way to be satisfied with the present state of 
things is to enjoy the present state of things. Over 
the cavalier mind this world passes with a thrill of 
delight ; there is an exultation in a daily event, 
zest in the ' regular thing,' joy at an old feast." ^ 
Is it not most natural that the writer of a pas- 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 95 

sage like that should have been a consummate 
critic of politics, seeing institutions through men, 
the only natural way? It was as necessary that 
he should be able to enjoy Sydney Smith and re- 
cognize the seer in Wordsworth as that he should 
be able to conceive the cavaHer life and point of 
view ; and in each perception there is the same 
power. He is as little at fault in understanding 
men of his own day. What would you wish bet- 
ter than his celebrated character of a " constitu- 
tional statesman," for example ? "A constitutional 
statesman is a man of common opinions and un- 
common abilities." Peel is his example. " His 
opinions resembled the daily accumulating insen- 
sible deposits of a rich alluvial soil. The great 
stream of time flows on with all things on its sur- 
face ; and slowly, grain by grain, a mould of wise 
experience is unconsciously left on the still, ex- 
tended intellect. . . . The stealthy accumulating 
words of Peel seem like the quiet leavings of some 
outward tendency, which brought these, but might 
as well have brought others. There is no peculiar 
stamp, either, on the ideas. They might have 
been any one's ideas. They belong to the general 
diffused stock of observations which are to be 
found in the civilized world. . . . He insensibly 
takes in and imbibes the ideas of those ai'bund him. 



96 A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 

If he were left in a vacuum, he would have no 
ideas." 

What strikes one most, perhaps, in all these 
passages, is the realizing imagination which illu- 
minates them. And it is an imagination with a 
practical character all its own. It is not a creating, 
but a conceiving imagination ; not the imagination 
of the fancy, but the imagination of the under- 
standing. Conceiving imaginations, however, are 
of two kinds. For the one kind the understanding 
serves as a lamp of guidance ; upon the other the 
understanding acts as an electric excitant, a keen 
irritant. Bagehot's was evidently of the first kind ; 
Carlyle's, conspicuously of the second. There is 
something in common between the minds of these 
two men as they conceive society. Both have a 
capital grip upon the actual; both can conceive 
without confusion the complex phenomena of soci- 
ety ; both send humorous glances of searching in- 
sight into the hearts of men. But it is the differ- 
ence between them that most arrests our attention. 
Bagehot has the scientific imagination, Carlyle the 
passionate. Bagehot is the embodiment of witty 
common sense ; all the movements of his mind 
illustrate that vivacious sanity which he has himself 
called "animated moderation." ^Carlyle, on the 
other hand, conceives men and their motives too 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 97 

often with a hot intolerance ; there is heat in his 
imagination, — a heat that sometimes scorches and 
consumes. Life is for him dramatic, full of fierce, 
imperative forces. Even when the world rings 
with laughter, it is laughter which, in his ears, is 
succeeded by an echo of mockery ; laughter which 
is but a defiance of tears. The actual which you 
touch in Bagehot is the practical, operative actual 
of a world of workshops and parliaments, — a 
world of which workshops and parliaments are the 
natural and desirable products. Carlyle flouts at 
modern legislative assemblies as " talking shops," 
and yearns for action such as is commanded by 
masters of action ; preaches the doctrine of work 
and silence in some thirty volumes octavo. Bage- 
hot points out that prompt, crude action is the 
instinct and practice of the savage ; that talk, the 
deliberation of assemblies, the slow concert of 
masses of men, is the cultivated fruit of civiliza- 
tion, nourishing to all the powers of right action 
in a society which is not simple and primitive, but 
advanced and complex. He is no more imposed 
upon by parliamentary debates than Carlyle is. 
He knows that they are stupid, and, so far as wise 
utterance goes, in large part futile, too. But he is 
not irritated, as Carlyle is, for, to say the fact, he 
sees more than Carlyle sees. He sees the force 



98 A LITEBAEY POLITICIAN. 

and value of tlie stupidity. He is wise, along with 
Burke, in regarding prejudice as the cement of 
society. He knows that slow thought is the ballast 
of a self-governing state. Stanch, knitted timbers 
are as necessary to the ship as sails. Unless the 
huU is conservative in holding stubbornly together 
in the face of every argument of sea weather, 
there '11 be lives and fortunes lost. Bagehot can 
laugh at unreasoning bias. It brings a merry 
twinkle into his eye to undertake the good sport 
of dissecting stolid stupidity. But he would not 
for the world abolish bias and stupidity. He would 
much rather have society hold together ; much 
rather see it grow than undertake to reconstruct it. 
" You remember my joke against you about the 
moon," writes Sydney Smith to Jeffrey ; " d — n 
the solar system — bad light — planets too distant 
— pestered with comets — feeble contrivance ; 
could make a better with great ease." There was 
nothing of this in Bagehot. He was inclined to be 
quite tolerant of the solar system. He understood 
that society was more quickly bettered by sjnnpa- 
thy than by antagonism. 

Bagehot's limitations, though they do not ob- 
trude themselves upon your attention as his excel- 
lencies do, are in truth as sharp-cut and clear 
as his thought itself. It would not be just the 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 99 

truth to say that his power is that of critical analy- 
sis only, for he ican and does construct thought 
concerning antique and obscure systems of political 
life and social action. But it is true that he does 
not construct for the future. You receive stimula- 
tion from him and a certain feeling of elation. 
There is a fresh air stirring in all his utterances 
that is unspeakably refreshing. You open your 
mind to the fine influence, and feel younger for hav- 
ing been in such an atmosphere. It is an atmosphere 
clarified and bracing almost beyond example else- 
where. But you know what you lack in Bagehot if 
you have read Burke. You miss the deep eloquence 
which awakens purpose. You are not in contact 
with systems of thought or with principles that 
dictate action, but only with a perfect explanation. 

You would go to Burke, not to Bagehot, for 
inspiration in the infinite tasks of self-government ; 
though you would, if you were wise, go to Bagehot 
rather than to Burke if you wished to realize just 
what were the practical daily conditions under 
which those tasks were to be worked out. 

Moreover, there is a deeper lack in Bagehot. 
He has no sympathy with the voiceless body of the 
people, with the "mass of unknown men." He 
conceives the work of government to be a work 
which is possible only to the instructed few. He 



100 A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 

would have the mass served, and served with de- 
votion, but he would trouble to ^ see them attempt 
to serve themselves. He has not the stout fibre 
and the unquestioning faith in the right and capa- 
city of inorganic majorities which make the demo- 
crat. He has none of the heroic boldness necessary 
for faith in wholesale pohtical aptitude and capacity. 
He takes democracy in detail in his thought, and 
to take it in detail makes it look very awkward 
indeed. 

And yet surely it would not occur to the veriest 
democrat that ever vociferated the " sovereignty of 
the people " to take umbrage at anything Bagehot 
might chance to say in dissection of democracy. 
What he says is seldom provokingly true. There 
is something in it all that is better than a " saving 
clause," and that is a saving humor. Humor ever 
keeps the whole of his matter sound ; it is an excel- 
lent salt that keeps sweet the sharpest of his say- 
ings. Indeed, Bagehot's wit is so prominent among 
his gifts that I am tempted here to enter a general 
plea for wit as fit company for high thoughts and 
weighty subjects. Wit does not make a subject 
light ; it simply beats it into shape to be handled 
readily. For my part, I make free acknowledg- 
ment that no man seems to me master of his sub- 
ject who cannot take liberties with it ; who cannot 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN. 101 

slap his propositions on the back and be hail-fellow 
well met with them. Suspect a man of shallowness 
who always takes himself and all that he thinks 
seriously. For light on a dark subject commend 
me to a ray of wit. Most of your solemn explana- 
tions are mere farthing candles in the great ex- 
panse of a difficidt question. Wit is not, I admit, 
a steady light, but ah ! its flashes give you sudden 
glimpses of unsuspected things such as you will 
never see without it. It is the summer lightning, 
which will bring more to your startled eye in an 
instant, out of the hiding of the night, than you 
will ever be at the pains to observe in the full blaze 
of noon. 

Wit is movement, is play of mind; and the 
mind cannot get play without a sufficient play- 
ground. Without movement outside the world of 
books, it is impossible a man should see aught but 
the very neatly arranged phenomena of that world. 
But it is possible for a man's thought to be in- 
structed by the world of affairs without the man 
himself becoming a part of it. Indeed, it is ex- 
ceedingly hard for one who is in and of it to hold 
the world of affairs off at arm's length and observe 
it. He has no vantage-ground. He had better for 
a while seek the distance of books, and get his per- 
spective. The literary politician, let it be distinctly 



102 A LITER ABY POLITICIAN. 

said, is a very fine, a very superior species of the 
man thouglitful. He reads books as he would lis- 
ten to men talk. He stands apart, and looks on, 
with humorous, sympathetic smile, at the play of 
policies. He will tell you for the asking what the 
players are thinking about. He divines at once 
how the parts are cast. He knows beforehand 
what each act is to discover. He might readily 
guess what the dialogue is to contain. Were you 
short of scene-shifters, he could serve you admira- 
bly in an emergency. And he is a better critic of 
the play than the players. 

Had I command of the culture of men, I should 
wish to raise up for the instruction and stimulation 
of my nation more than one sane, sagacious, pene- 
trative critic of men and affairs like Walter Bage- 
hot. But that, of course. The proper thesis to 
draw from his singular genius is this : It is not the 
constitutional lawyer, nor the student of the mere 
machinery and legal structure of institutions, nor 
the politician, a mere handler of that machinery, 
who is competent to understand and expound gov- 
ernment ; but the man who finds the materials for 
his thought far and wide, in everything that reveals 
character and circumstance and motive. It is 
necessary to stand with the poets as well as with 
lawgivers ; with the fathers of the race as well as 



A LITERARY POLITICIAN'. 103 

with your neighbor of to-day ; with those who toil 
and are sick at heart as well as with those who 
prosper and laugh and take their pleasure ; with 
the merchant and the manufacturer as well as with 
the closeted student ; wiih the schoolmaster and 
with those whose only school is life ; with the 
orator and with the men who have wrought always 
in silence ; in the midst of thought and also in the 
midst of affairs, if you would really comprehend 
those great wholes of history and of character 
which are the vital substance of politics. 



V. 

THE INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

In the middle of the last century two Irish 
adventurers crossed over into England in search of 
their fortunes. Rare feUows they were, bringing 
treasure with them ; but finding it somehow hard 
to get upon the market : traders with a curious 
cargo, offering edification in exchange for a living, 
and concealing the best of English under a rich 
brogue. They were Edmund Burke and Oliver 
Goldsmith. 

They did not cross over together : 't was no joint 
venture. They had been fellow students at Trinity 
College, Dublin ; but they had not, so far as we 
can learn, known each other there. Each went 
his own way tiU they became comrades in the reign 
of Samuel Johnson at the Turk's Head Tavern. 
Burke stepped very boldly forth into the exposed 
paths of public life ; Goldsmith plunged into the 
secret ways about Grub Street. The one gave us 
essays upon public questions incomparable for their 
reach of view and their splendid power of expres- 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 105 

sion; the other gave us writings so exquisite for 
their delicacy, purity, and finish as to incline us to 
love him almost as much as those who knew him 
loved him. We could not easily have forgiven 
Ireland if she had not given us these men. The 
one had grave faults of temper ; the other was a 
reckless, roystering fellow, with a most irrepressible 
Irish disposition ; but how much less we should have 
known without Burke, how much less we should 
have enjoyed without Goldsmith ! They have con- 
quered places for themselves in English Hterature 
from which we neither can nor would dislodge 
them. For their sakes alone we can afford to for- 
give Ireland all the trouble she has caused us. 

There is no man anywhere to be found in the 
annals of Parliament who seems more thoroughly 
to belong to England than does Edmund Burke, 
indubitable Irishman though he was. His words, 
now that they have cast off their brogue, ring out 
the authentic voice of the best political thought of 
the English race. " If any man ask me," he cries, 
" what a free government is, I answer, that, for any 
practical purpose, it is what the people think so, — 
and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, 
and competent judges of the matter." " Abstract 
liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be 
found. Liberty adheres in some sensible object ; 



106 INTEBPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBEBTY. 

and every nation has formed to itseK some favorite 
point, which by way of eminence becomes the crite- 
rion of their happiness." These sentences, taken 
from his writings on American affairs, might serve 
as a sort of motto of the practical spirit of our race 
in affairs of government. Look further, and you 
shall see how his imagination presently illuminates 
and suffuses his maxims of practical sagacity with 
a fine blaze of insight, a keen glow of feeling, in 
which you recognize that other masterful quality of 
the race, its intense and elevated conviction. "My 
hold on the colonies," he declares, " is in the close 
affection which grows from common names, from 
kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal 
protection. These are the ties which, though light 
as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the 
colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights 
associated with your government, — they will chng 
and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will 
be of power to tear them from their allegiance. 
But let it once be understood that your government 
may be one thing and their privileges another, that 
these two things may exist without any mutual 
relation, — and the cement is gone, the cohesion is 
loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dis- 
solution. So long as you have the wisdom to keep 
the sovereign power of this country as the sanctuary 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 107 

of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our 
common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons 
of England worship freedom, they will turn their 
faces towards you." " We cannot, I fear," he says 
proudly of the colonies, " we cannot falsify the 
pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them 
that they are not sprung from a nation in whose 
veins the blood of freedom circulates. The lan- 
guage in which they would hear you tell them this 
tale woidd detect the imposition ; your speech 
would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest 
person on earth to argue another Englishman into 
slavery." Does not your blood stir at these pas- 
sages ? And is it not because, besides loving what 
is nobly written, you feel that every word strikes 
towards the heart of the things that have made 
your blood what it has proved to be in the history 
of our race ? 

These passages, it should be remembered, are 
taken from a speech in Parliament and from a 
letter written by Burke to his constituents in 
Bristol. He had no thought to make them perma- 
nent sentences of political philosophy. They were 
meant only to serve an immediate purpose in the 
advancement of contemporaneous policy. They 
were framed for the circumstances of the time. 
They speak out spontaneously amidst matter of the 



108 INTERPRETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

moment : and they could be matched everywhere 
throughout his pamphlets and public utterances. 
No other similar productions that I know of have 
this singular, and as it were inevitable, quality of 
permanency. They have emerged from the mass 
of political writings put forth in their time with 
their freshness untouched, their significance un- 
obscured, their splendid vigor unabated. It is this 
that we marvel at, that they should remain modern 
and timely, purged of every element and seed of 
decay. The man who could do this must needs 
arrest our attention and challenge our inquiry. 
We wish to account for him as we should wish to 
penetrate the secrets of the human spirit and know 
the springs of genius. o 

Of the public life of Burke we know all that we 
could wish. He became so prominent a figure in 
the great affairs of his day that even the casual 
observer cannot fail to discern the main facts of 
his career ; while the close student can follow him 
year by year through every step of his service. 
But his private life was withdrawn from general 
scrutiny in an unusual degree. He manifested 
always a marked reserve about his individual and 
domestic affairs, deliberately, it would seem, shield- 
ing them from impertinent inquiry. He loved the 
privacy of life in a great city, where one may escape 



INTEEPRETEE OF ENGLISH LIBEETY. 109 

notice in the crowd and enjoy a grateful " freedom 
from remark and petty censure." "Though I 
have the honor to represent Bristol," he said to 
Boswell, " I should not like to live there ; I should 
be obliged to be so much upon my good behavior. 
In London a man may live in splendid society at 
one time, and in frugal retirement at another, 
without animadversion. There, and there alone, a 
man's house is truly his castle, in which he can 
be in perfect safety from intrusion whenever he 
pleases. I never shall forget how well this was 
expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell : ' The 
chief advantage of London,' he said, 'is, that a 
man is always so near his burrow.^ " Burke took 
to his burrow often enough to pique our curiosity 
sorely. This singular, high-minded adventurer had 
some queer companions, we know: questionable 
fellows, whose life he shared, perhaps with a certain 
Bohemian relish, without sharing their morals or 
their works. It seems as incongruous that such 
wisdom and public spirit as breathe through his 
writings should have come to his thought in such 
company as that an exquisite idyll like Goldsmith's 
" Vicar of Wakefield " should have been conceived 
and written in squalid garrets. But neither Burke 
nor Goldsmith had been born into such comrade- 
ships or such surroundings. Doubtless, as some- 



110 INTERPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

times happens, their minds kept their first freshness, 
taking no taint from the world that touched them 
on every hand in their manhood, after their minds 
had been formed. Goldsmith, as everybody knows, 
remained an innocent all his life, a naif and pettish 
boy amidst sophisticated men ; and Burke too, not- 
withstanding his dignity and commanding intellec- 
tual habit, shows sometimes a touch of the same 
simplicity, a like habit of unguarded seK-revelation. 
'T was their form, no doubt, of that impulsive and 
ingenuous quality which we observe in all Irislimen, 
and which we often mistake for simplicity. 'T was 
a flavor of their native soil. It was also something 
more and better than that, however. Not every 
Irishman displays such hospitality for direct and 
simple images of truth as these men showed, for 
that is characteristic only of the open and un- 
sophisticated mind, — the mind that has kept pure 
and open eyes. Not that Burke always sees the 
truth; he is even deeply prejudiced often, and 
there are some things that he cannot see. But the 
passion that dominates him when he is wrong, as 
when he is right, is a natural passion, born with 
him, not acquired from a disingenuous world that 
mistakes interest for justice. His nature tells in 
everything. It is stock of his character which he 
contributes to the subjects his mind handles. He 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. Ill 

is trading always witli the original treasure he 
brought over with him at the first. He has never 
impaired his genuineness, or damaged his princi- 
ples. 

Just where Burke got his generous constitution 
and predisposition to enlightened ways of thinking 
it is not easy to see. Certainly Richard Burke, 
his brother, the only other member of the family 
whose character we discern distinctly, had a quite 
opposite bent. The father was a steady Dublin 
attorney, a Protestant, and a man, so far as we 
know, of solid but not brilliant parts. The mo- 
ther had been a Miss Nagle, of a Roman Catholic 
family, which had multiplied exceedingly in County 
Cork. Of the home and its life we know singu- 
larly little. We are told that many children were 
born to the good attorney, but we hear of only four 
of them that grew to maturity, Garret, Edmund, 
Richard, and a sister best known to Edmund's bio- 
graphers as Mrs. French. Edmund, the second 
son, was born on the tweKth of January, 1729, in 
the second year of the reign of George II., Robert 
Walpole being chief minister of the Crown. How 
he fared or what sort of lad he was for the first 
twelve years of his life we have no idea. We only 
know that in the year 1741, being then twelve 
years old, he was sent with his brothers Garret and 



112 INTEBPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBEBTY. 

Ricliard to the school of one Abraham Shackleton, 
a most capable and exemplary Quaker, at Ballytore, 
County Kildare, to get, in some two years' time, 
what he himself always accounted the best part of 
his education. The character of the good master 
at Ballytore told upon the sensitive boy, who all 
his life through had an eye for such elevation and 
calm force of quiet rectitude as are to be seen in 
the best Quakers ; and with Richard Shackleton, 
the master's son, he formed a friendship from which 
no vicissitude of his subsequent career ever loosened 
his heart a whit. All his life long the ardent, 
imaginative statesman, deeply stirred as he was by 
the momentous agitation of affairs, — swept away 
as he was from other friends, — retained his love 
for the grave, retired, almost austere, but generous 
and constant man who had been his favorite 
schoolfellow. It is but another evidence of his un- 
failing regard for whatever was steady, genuine, 
and open to the day in character and conduct, o 
At fourteen he left Ballytore and was entered at 
Trinity College, Dublin. Those were days when 
youths went to college tender, before they had be- 
come too tough to take impressions readily. But 
Burke, even at that callow age, cannot be said to 
have been teachable. He learned a vast deal, in- 
deed, but he did not learn much of it from his 



INTEBPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 113 

nominal masters at Trinity. Apparently Master 
Shackleton, at Ballytore, had enabled liim to find 
his own mind. His foi^r years at college were 
years of wide and eager reading, but not years of 
systematic and disciplinary study. With singular, 
if not exemplary, self-confidence, he took his 
education into his own hands. He got at the 
heart of books through their spirit, it would seem, 
rather than through their grammar. He sought 
them out for what they could yield him in thought, 
rather than for what they could yield him in the 
way of exact scholarship. That this boy should 
have had such an appetite for the world's literature, 
old and new, need not surprise us. Other lads be- 
fore and since have found big libraries all too small 
for them. What should arrest our attention is, 
the law of mind disclosed in the habits of such lads : 
the quick and various curiosity of original minds, 
and particularly of imaginative minds. They long 
for matter to expand themselves upon : they will 
climb any dizzy height from which an exciting 
prospect is promised : it is their joy by some means 
to see the world of men and affairs. Burke set 
out as a boy to see the world that is contained in 
books ; and in his journeyings he met a man after 
his own heart in Cicero, the copious orator and 
versatile man of affairs, — the only man at all like 



114 INTEBPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

Burke for ricliness, expansiveness, and variety of 
mind in all the ancient world, Cicero he conned 
as his master and model. And then, having had 
his fill for the time of discursive study and having 
completed also his four years of routine, he was 
graduated, taking his degree in the spring of 1748. 
His father had entered him as a student at the 
Middle Temple in 1747, meaning that he should 
seek the prizes of his profession in England rather 
than in the Httle world at home ; but he did not take 
up his residence in London until 1750, by which 
time he had attained his majority. What he did 
with the intervening two years, his biographers do 
not at all know, and it is idle to speculate, being 
confident, as we must, that he quite certainly did 
whatever he pleased. He did the same when he 
went up to London to live his terms at the Temple. 
" The law," he declared to Parliament more than 
twenty years afterwards, " is, in my opinion, one 
of the first and noblest of human sciences, — a 
science which does more to quicken and invigorate 
the understanding than all other kinds of learning 
put together ; but it is not apt, except in persons 
very happily born, to open and to liberalize the 
mind exactly in the same proportion ; " and, al- 
though himself a person " very happily born " in 
respect of all natural powers, he felt that the life 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 115 

of a lawyer would inevitably confine his roving 
mind within intolerably narrow limits. He learned 
the law, as he learned everything else, with an eye 
to discovering its points of contact with affairs, 
its intimate connections with the structure and 
functions of human society ; and, studying it thus, 
he made his way to so many of its secrets, won so 
firm a mastery of its central principles, as always 
to command the respect and even the admiration 
of lawyers. But the good attorney in Dublin 
was sorely disappointed. This was not what he 
had wanted. The son in whom he had centred 
his hopes preferred the life of the town to system- 
atic study in his chambers ; wrote for the papers 
instead of devoting himself to the special profession 
he had been sent to master. " Of his leisure 
time," said the " Annual Register " just after his 
death, " of his leisure time much was spent in the 
company of Mrs. Woffington, a celebrated actress, 
whose conversation was not less sought by men of 
wit and genius than by men of pleasure." 

We know very httle about the life of Burke for 
the ten years, 1750-60, his first ten years in Eng- 
land, — except that he did not diligently apply 
himsely to his nominal business, the study of the 
law; and between the years 1752 and 1757 his 
biographers can show hardly one authentic trace of 



116 INTERPRETEB OF ENGLISH LIBEBTY. 

his real life. They know neither his whereabouts 
nor his employments. Only one scrap of his corre- 
spondence remains from those years to give us any 
hint of the time. Even Richard Shackleton, his 
invariable confidant and bosom friend, hears never 
a word from him during that period, and is told 
afterwards only that his correspondent has been 
" sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts 
of the country, sometimes in France," and will 
" shortly, please God, be in America." He disap- 
pears a poor law student, under suspicion of his 
father for systematic neglect of duty ; when he re- 
appears he is married to the daughter of a worthy 
physician and is author of two philosophical works 
which are attracting a great deal of attention. We 
have reason to believe that, in the mean time, he 
did as much writing as they would take for the 
booksellers ; we know that he frequented the Lon- 
don theatres and several of the innumerable debat- 
ing clubs with which nether London abounded, 
whetting his faculties, it is said, upon those of a cer- 
tain redoubtable baker. He haunted the galleries 
and lobbies of the House of Commons. His hfalth 
showed signs of breaking, and Dr. Nugent took him 
from his lodgings in the Temple to his own house 
and allowed him to fall in love with his daughter. 
Partly for the sake of his health, perhaps, but more 



INTERPBETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 117 

particularly, no doubt, for the sake of satisfying an 
eager mind and a restless habit, he wandered off to 
" remote parts of the country " and to France, 
with one William Burke for company, a man either 
related to him or not related to him, he did not 
himself know which. In 1755, a long-suffering 
patience at length exhausted, his father shut the 
home treasury against him ; and then, — 't was the 
next year, — he published two philosophical works 
and married Miss Nugent. 

One might say, no doubt, that this is an intelli- 
gible enough account of a young fellow's life be- 
tween twenty and thirty : and that we can fill in 
the particulars for ourselves. We have known 
other young Irishmen of restless and volatile na- 
tures, and need make no mystery of this one. 
Goldsmith, too, disappeared, we remember, in that 
same decade, making show of studying medicine in 
Edinburgh, but not really studying it, and then 
wandering off to the Continent, and going it afoot 
in light-hearted, happy-go-lucky fashion through 
the haunts both of the gay Latin ra<jes and the 
sad Teutonic, greatly to the delectation, no doubt, 
of the natives, — for all the world loves an in- 
nocent Irishman, with his heart upon his sleeve. 
'T would all be very plain indeed if we found in 
Burke that light-hearted vein. But we do not. 



^ 118 



INTEBPRETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 



The fellow is sober and strenuous from the first, 
studying the things he was not sent to study 
with even too intent application, to the damage of 
his health, and looking through the pleasures of 
the town to the heart of the nation's affairs. He 
was a grave youth, evidently, gratifying his mind 
rather than his senses in the pleasures he sought ; 
and when he emerges from obscurity it is first to 
give us a touch of his quality in the matter of in- 
tellectual amusement, and then to turn at once to 
the serious business of the discussion of affairs to 
which the rest of his life was to be devoted. 

The two books which he gave the world in 1756 
were "A Vindication of Natural Society," a satirical 
piece in the manner of Bolingbroke, and " A Phil- 
osophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of 
the Sublime and Beautiful," which he had begun 
when he was nineteen and had since reconsidered 
and revised. Bolingbroke, not finding revealed re- 
ligion to his taste, had written a " Vindication of 
Natural Religion " which his vigorous and ele- 
vated style and skillful dialectic had done much to 
make plausible. Burke put forth his "Vindica- 
tion of Natural Society " as a posthumous work of 
the late noble lord, and so skillfully veiled the 
satirical character of the imitation as wholly to 
deceive some very grave critics, who thought they 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 119 

could discern Bolingbroke's flavor upon the tasting. 
For the style, too, they took to be unmistakably 
Bolingbroke's own. It had all his grandeur and 
air of distinction : it had his vocabulary and formal 
outline of phrase. The imitation was perfect. 
And yet if you will scrutinize it, the style is 
not Bolingbroke's, except in a trick or two, but 
Burke's. It seems Bolingbroke's rather because 
it is cold and without Burke's usual moral fervor 
than because it is rich and majestic and va- 
rious. There is no great formal difference be- 
tween Burke's style and Bolingbroke's : but there 
is a great moral and intellectual difference. When 
Burke is not in earnest there is perhaps no impor- 
tant difference at all. And in the " Vindication 
of Natural Society " Burke is not in earnest. The 
book is not, indeed, a parody, and its satirical 
quality is much too covert to make it a successful 
satire. Much that Burke urges against ci^dl 
society he could urge in good faith, and his mind 
works soberly upon it. It is only the main thesis 
that he does not seriously mean. The rest he might 
have meant as Bolingbroke would have meant it. 

The essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, though 
much admired by so great a master as Lessing, has 
not worn very well as philosophy. It is full, how- 
ever, of acute and interesting observations, and is 



120 INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

adorned in parts with touches of rich color put on 
with the authentic strokes of a master. We pre- 
serve it, perhaps, only because Burke wrote it ; 
and yet when we read it we feel inclined to pro- 
nounce it worth keeping for its own sake. 

Both these essays were apprentice work. Burke 
was trying his hand. They make us the more 
curious about the conditions of what must have 
been a notable apprenticeship. Young Burke 
must have gone to school to the world in a way 
worth knowing. But we cannot know, and that 's 
the end on 't. Probably even William Burke, 
Edmund's companion, could give us no very satis- 
factory account of the matter. The explanation 
lay in what he thought and not in what he did as 
he knocked about the world. 

The company Burke kept Was as singular as his 
talents, though scarcely so eminent. We speak of 
" Burke," but the London of his day spoke of " the 
Burkes," meaning William, who may or may not 
have been Edmund's kinsman, Edmund himself, 
and Richard, Edmund's younger brother, who had 
followed him to London to become, to say truth, an 
adventurer emphatically not of the elevated sort. 
Edmund was destined to become the leader of Eng- 
land's thought in more than one great matter of 
policy, and has remained a master among all who 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 121 

think profoundly upon public affairs ; but William 
was for long the leader and master of " the Burkes." 
He was English born ; had been in Westminster 
School ; and had probably just come out from 
Christ Church, Oxford, when he became the com- 
panion of Edmund's wanderings. He was a man 
of intellect and literary power enough to be deemed 
the possible author of the " Letters of Junius ; " he 
was born moreover with an eye for the ways of 
the world, and could push his own fortunes with an 
unhesitating hand. It was he who first got public 
office, and it was he who formed the influential 
connections which got Edmund into Parliament. 
He himself entered the House at the same time, 
and remained there, a useful party member, for 
some eight years. He made those from whom he 
sought favors dislike him for his audacity in demand- 
ing the utmost, and more than the utmost, that he 
could possibly hope to get ; but he seems to have 
made those whom he served love him with a very 
earnest attachment. He was self-seeking ; but he 
was capable of generosity, to the point of seK-sac- 
rifice even, when he wished to help his friend. He 
early formed a partnership with Richard Burke in 
immense stock-jobbing speculations in the securities 
of the East India Company ; but he also formed a 
literary partnership with Edmund in the prepa- 



122 INTEBFRETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

ration of a sketch of the European settlements in 
America, and made himself respected as a strong 
party writer in various pamphlets on questions of 
the day. He could unite the two brothers by spec- 
ulating with the one and thinking with the other. 

Such were " the Burkes." Edmund's home was 
always the home also of the other two, whenever 
they wished to make it so ; the strongest personal 
affection, avowed always by Edmund with his char- 
acteristic generous warmth, bound the three men 
together ; their purses they had in common. Ed- 
mund was not expected, apparently, to take part 
in the speculations which held William and Rich- 
ard together ; something held him aloof to which 
they consented, — some natural separateness of 
mind and character which they evidently accepted 
and respected. There can hardly he said to have 
been any aloofness of disposition on Edmund's 
part. There is something in an Irishman, — even 
in an Irishman who holds himself to the strictest 
code of upright conduct, — which forbids his act- 
ing as moral censor upon others. He can love a 
man none the less for generous and manly qualities 
because that man does what he himself would not 
do. Burke, moreover, had an easy standard all 
his life about accepting money favors. He seems 
to have felt somehow that his intense and whole- 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 123 

hearted devotion to his friends justified gifts and 
forgiven loans of money from them. He shared 
the prosperity of his kinsmen without compunction, 
using what he got most liberally for the assistance 
of others ; and when their fortunes came to a sud- 
den ruin, he helped them with what he had. We 
ought long ago to have learned that the purest mo- 
tives and the most elevated standards of conduct 
may go along with a singular laxness of moral de- 
tail in some men ; and that such characters will 
often constrain us to love them to the point of jus- 
tifying everything that they ever did. Edmund 
Burke's close union with William and Richard 
does not present the least obstacle to our admira- 
tion for the noble qualities of mind and heart 
which he so conspicuously possessed, or make us 
for a moment doubt the thorough disinterestedness 
of his great career. 

Burke's marriage was a very happy one. Mrs. 
Burke's thoroughly sweet temperament acted as a 
very grateful and potent charm to soothe her hus- 
band's mind when shaken by the agitations of public 
affairs ; her quiet capacity for domestic manage- 
ment relieved him of many small cares which might 
have added to his burdens. Her affection satisfied 
his ardent nature. He speaks of her in his will as 
" my entirely beloved and incomparable wife," and 



124 INTEBPBETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY, 

every glimpse we get of their home life confirms the 
estimate. After his marriage the most serious part 
of his intellectual life begins ; the commanding pas- 
sion of his mind is disclosed. He turns away from 
philosophical amusements to public affairs. In 
1757 appeared " An Account of the European Set- 
tlements in America," which William Burke had 
doubtless written, but which Edmund had almost 
certainly radically revised ; and Edmund himseK 
published the first part of " An Abridgment of the 
History of England " which he never completed. In 
1758, he proposed to Dodsley, the publisher, a yearly 
volume, to be known as the " Annual Eegister," 
which should chronicle and discuss the affairs of 
England and the Continent. It was the period of 
the Seven Years' War, which meant for England a 
sharp and glorious contest with France for the pos- 
session of America. Burke was wiUing to write 
the annals of the critical year 1758 for a hundred 
pounds ; and so, in 1759, the first volume of the 
" Annual Register " appeared ; and the plan then 
so wisely conceived has yielded its annual volume 
to the present day. Burke never acknowledged his 
connection with this great work, — he never pub- 
licly recognized anything he had done upon contract 
for the publishers, — but it is quite certain that for 
very many years his was the presiding and plan- 



INTEBPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 125 

ning mind in the production of the " Register." For 
the first few years of its life he probably wrote the 
whole of the record of events with his own hand. 
It was a more useful apprenticeship than that in 
philosophy. It gave him an intimate acquaintance 
with affairs which must have served as a direct 
preparation for the great contributions he was des- 
tined to make to the mind and policy of the Whig 
party. 

But this, even in addition to other hack work 
for the booksellers, did not keep Burke out of pe- 
cuniary straits. He sought, but failed to get, an 
appointment as consul at Madrid, using the interest 
of Dr. Markham, William's master at Westminster 
School ; and then he engaged himself as a sort of 
private secretary or literary attendant to WiUiam 
Gerard Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to 
the almost entire exclusion of all other employ- 
ments, for some four years, going with him for a 
season to Ireland, where Hamilton for a time held 
the appointment of Secretary to the Lord Lieuten- 
ant. Hamilton is described by one of Burke's 
friends as " a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered- 
hearted, envious reptile," and Mr. Morley says that 
there is " not a word too many nor too strong in 
the description." At any rate, Burke's proud 
spirit presently revolted from further service, and 



126 INTEBPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBEBTY. 

he threw up a pension of three hundred pounds 
which Hamilton had obtained for him rather than 
retain any connection with the man, or remain 
under any sort of obligation to him. In the mean 
time, however, his relations with Hamilton had put 
him in the way of meeting many public men of 
weight and influence, and he had gotten his first 
direct introduction to the world of affairs. 

It was 1764 when he shook himself free from 
this connection. 1764 is a year to be marked in 
English literary annals. It was in the spring of 
that year that that most celebrated of literary clubs 
was formed at the Turk's Head Tavern, Gerrard 
Street, Soho, by notable good company : Dr. John- 
son, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, 
Sheridan, Gibbon, Dr. Barnard, Beauclerk, Lang- 
ton, — we know them all ; for has not Boswell 
given us the freedom of the Club and made us de- 
lighted participants in its conversations and diver- 
sions? Into this company Burke was taken at 
once. His writings had immediately attracted the 
attention of such men as these, and had promptly 
procured him an introduction into literary society. 
His powers told nowhere more brilliantly than in 
conversation. " It is when you come close to a 
man in conversation," said Dr. Johnson, " that you 
discover what his real abilities are. To make a 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 127 

speech in an assembly is a sort of knack. Now 
I honor Thurlow ; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he 
fairly puts his mind to yours." There can be no 
disputing the dictum of the greatest master of con- 
versation : and the admirer of Burke must be will- 
ing to accept it, at any rate for the nonce, for 
Johnson admitted that Burke invariably put him 
on his mettle. " That fellow," he exclaimed, *' calls 
forth all my powers ! " " Burke's talk," he said, 
" is the ebullition of his mind ; he does not talk 
from a desire of distinction, but because his mind 
is full ; he is never humdrum, never unwilling to 
talk, nor in haste to leave off." The redoubtable 
doctor loved a worthy antagonist in the great game 
of conversation, and he always gave Burke his un- 
grudging admiration. When he lay d}dng, Burke 
visited his bedside, and, finding Johnson very 
weak, anxiously expressed the hope that his pres- 
ence cost him no inconvenience. " I must be in a 
wretched state indeed," cried the great-hearted old 
man, " when your company would not be a dehght 
to me." It was short work for Burke to get the 
admiration of the company at the Turk's Head. 
But he did much more than that : he won their de- 
voted affection. Goldsmith said that Burke wound 
his way into a subject like a serpent ; but he made 
his way straight into the hearts of his friends. 



128 INTEBPRETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

His powers are all of a piece : his heart is inextri- 
cably mixed up with his mind : his opinions are 
immediately transmuted into convictions : he does 
not talk for distinction, because he does not use his 
mind for the mere intellectual pleasure of it, but 
because he also deeply feels what he thinks. He 
speaks without calculation, almost impulsively. 

That is the reason why we can be so sure of the 
essential purity of his nature from the character of 
his writings. They are not purely intellectual pro- 
ductions : there is no page of abstract reasoning 
to be found in Burke. His mind works upon con- 
crete objects, and he speaks always with a certain 
passion, as if his affections were involved. He is 
irritated by opposition, because opposition in the 
field of affairs, in which his mind operates, touches 
some interest that is dear to him. Noble generali- 
zations, it is true, everywhere broaden his matter : 
there is no more philosophical writer in English 
in the field of politics than Burke. But look, and 
you shall see that his generalizations are never de- 
rived from abstract premises. The reasoning is 
upon familiar matter of to-day. He is simply tak- 
ing questions of the moment to the light, holding 
them up to be seen where great principles of con- 
duct may shine upon them from the general ex- 
perience of the race. He is not constructing 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 129 

systems of thought, but simply stripping thought 
of its accidental features. He is even deeply im- 
patient of abstractions in political reasoning, so 
passionately is he devoted to what is practicable, 
and fit for wise men to do. To know such a man 
is to experience all the warmer forces of the mind, 
to feel the generous and cheering heat of character ; 
and all noble natures will love such a man, because 
of kinship of quality. All noble natures that came 
close to Burke did love him and cherish their 
knowledge of him. They loaned him money with- 
out stint, and then forgave him the loans, as if it 
were a privilege to help him, and no way unnatural 
that he should never retui'n what he received, find- 
ing his spirit made for fraternal, not for commer- 
cial relations. 

It is pleasing, as it is also a little touching, to 
see how his companions thus freely accorded to 
Burke the immunities and prerogatives of a prince 
amongst them. No one failed to perceive how 
large and imperial he was, alike in natural gifts 
and in the wonderful range of his varied acquire- 
ments. Sir James Mackintosh, though he very 
earnestly combated some of Burke's views, in- 
tensely admired his greatness. He declared that 
Gibbon " mio:ht have been taken from a corner of 
Burke's mind without ever being missed." " A wit 



130 INTEBFBETEE OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

said of Gibbon's ' Autobiography ' that he did not 
know the difference between himseK and the Koman 
Empire. He has narrated his * progressions from 
Londoii to Buriton and from Buriton to London ' 
in the same monotonous, majestic periods that he 
recorded the fall of states and empires." And 
we certainly feel a sense of incongruity ; the two 
subjects, we perceive, are hardly commensurable. 
Perhaps in Burke's case we should have felt differ- 
/ ently,,— we cZo feel differently. In that extraordi- 

nary "Letter to a Noble Lord," in which he defends 
his peiision'so proudly against the animadversions 
of the Duke of Bedford, how magnificently he speaks 
of hiis services to' the country ; how proud and ma- 
• jestic a pi^ce qf aiitobiography it is! How insig- 
nificant does the ancient house of Bedford seem, 
with all its long generations, as compared with this 
single and now lonely man, without distinguished 
ancestry or hope of posterity ! He speaks grandly 
about himself, as about everything; and yet I see 
no disparity between the subject and the manner ! 
Outside the small circle of those who knew and 
loved him, his generation did not wholly perceive 
this. There seemed a touch of pretension in this 
proud tone taken by a man who had never held 
high office or exercised great power. He had made 
great speeches, indeed, no one denied that ; he had 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 131 

written great party pamplilets, — that everybody 
knew ; his had been the intellectual force within 
the group of Whigs that followed Lord Rocking- 
ham, — that, too, the world in general perceived 
and acknowledged; and when he died, England 
knew the man who had gone to be a great man. 
But, for all that, his tone must, in his generation, 
have seemed disproportioned to the part he had 
played. His great authority is over us rather than 
over the men of his own day. 

Burke had the thoughts of a great statesman, 
and uttered them with unapproachable nobility ; 
but he never wielded the power of a great states- 
man. He was kept always in the background in 
active politics, in minor posts, and employed upon 
subordinate functions. This would be a singular 
circumstance, if there were any novelty in it ; but 
the practice of keeping men of insignificant birth 
out of the great offices was a practice which had 
" broadened down from precedent to precedent " 
until it had become too strong for even Burke to 
breast or stem. Perhaps, too, there were faults of 
temper which rendered Burke unfit to exercise 
authority in directing the details, and determining 
the practical measures, of public poHcy : — but we 
shall look into that presently. 

In July, 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham 



182 INTERPBETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

became prime minister of England, and Burke 
became his private secretary. He owed bis intro- 
duction to Lord Rockingham, as usual, to the good 
offices of William Burke, who seems to have found 
means of knowing everybody it was to the interest 
of " the Burkes " to know. A more fortunate con- 
nection could hardly have been made. Lord Rock- 
ingham, though not a man of original powers, was 
a man of the greatest simplicity and nobleness of 
character, and, like most upright men, knew how 
to trust other men. He gave Burke immediate 
proof of his manly qualities. The scheming old 
Duke of Newcastle, who ought to have been a 
connoisseur in low men, mistook Burke for one. 
Shocked that this obscurely born and unknown fel- 
low should be accorded confidential relations by 
Lord Rockingham, he hurried to his lordship with 
an assortment of hastily selected slanders against 
Burke. His real name, he reported, was O'Bourke ; 
he was an Irish adventurer without character, and 
a rank Papist to boot ; it would ruin the admin- 
istration to have such a man connected with the 
First Lord of the Treasury. Rockingham, with 
great good sense and frankness, took the whole 
matter at once to Burke ; was entirely satisfied by 
Burke's denials; and admitted him immediately 
to intimate relations of warm personal friendship 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 133 

whicli only death broke off. William Burke ob- 
tained for himself an Undersecretaryship of State 
and arranged with Lord Verney, at that time his 
partner in East India speculations, that two of his 
lordship's parliamentary boroughs should be put 
at his and Edmund's disposal. Edmund Burke, 
accordingly, entered Parliament for the borough 
of Wendover on the 14th of January, 1766, at 
the age of thirty-seven, and in the first vigor of 
his powers. 

"Now we who know Burke," announced Dr. 
Johnson, " know that he will be one of the first 
men in the country." Burke promptly fulfilled 
the prediction. He made a speech before he had 
been in the House two weeks ; a speech that made 
him at once a marked man. His health was now 
firmly established ; he had a commanding physique ; 
his figure was tall and muscular, and his bearing 
full of a dignity which had a touch almost of haugh- 
tiness in it. Although his action was angular and 
awkward, his extraordinary richness and fluency of 
utterance drew the attention away from what he 
was doing to what he was saying. His voice was 
harsh, and did not harmonize with the melodious 
measures in which his words poured forth ; but it 
was of unusual compass, and carried in it a sense 
of confidence and power. His utterance was too 



134 INTERPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY, 

rapid, his thought bore him too impulsively for- 
ward, but the pregnant matter he spoke " filled the 
town with wonder." The House was excited by 
new sensations. Members were astonished to re- 
cognize a broad philosophy of politics running 
through this ardent man's speeches. They felt the 
refreshment of the wide outlook he gave them, and 
were conscious of catching glimpses of excellent 
matter for reflection at every turn of his hurrying 
thought. They wearied of it, indeed, after a while : 
the pace was too hard for most of his hearers, and 
they finally gave over following him when the 
novelty and first excitement of the exercise had 
worn off. He too easily lost sight of his audience 
in his search for principles, and they resented his 
neglect of them, his indifference to their tastes. 
They felt his lofty style of reasoning as a sort of 
rebuke, and deemed his discursive wisdom out of 
place amidst their own thoughts of imperative per- 
sonal and party interest. He had, before very 
long, to accustom himself, therefore, to speak to an 
empty House and subsequent generations. His 
opponents never, indeed, managed to feel quite 
easy under his attacks : his arrows sought out their 
weak places to the quick, and they winced even 
when they coughed or seemed indifferent ; but they 
comforted themselves with the thought that the 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 135 

orator was also tedious and irritating to his own 
friends, teasing them too with keen rebukes and 
vexatious admonitions. The high and wise sort of 
speaking must always cause uneasiness in a political 
assembly. The more equal and balanced it is, the 
more must both parties be threatened with reproof. 
I would not be understood as saying that Burke's 
speeches were impartial. They were not. He had 
preferences which amounted to prejudices. He 
was always an intense party man. But then he 
was a party man with a difference. He believed 
that the interests of England were bound up with 
the fortunes of the Rockingham Whigs; but he 
did not separate the interests of his party and the 
interests of his country. He cherished party con- 
nections because he conceived them to be absolutely 
necessary for effective public service. " Where 
men are not acquainted with each other's princi- 
ples," he said, "nor experienced in each other's 
talents, nor at all practiced in their mutual habi- 
tudes or dispositions by joint efforts in business ; 
no personal confidence, no friendship, no common 
interest, subsisting among them ; it is evidently 
impossible that they can act a public part with 
uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a con- 
nection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to 
the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use ; 



136 INTEEPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unservice- 
able to the public." " When bad men combine, 
the good must associate." " It is not enough in a 
situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man 
means well to his country ; it is not enough that in 
his single person he never did an evil act, but 
always voted according to his conscience, and even 
harangued against every design which he appre- 
hended to be prejudicial to the interests of his 
country. . . . Duty demands and requires, that 
what is right should not only be made known, but 
made prevalent ; that what is evil should not only 
be detected, but defeated. When the public man 
omits to put himseK in a situation of doing his 
duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates 
the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he 
had formally betrayed it." Burke beheved the 
Rockingham Whigs to be a combination of good 
men, and he felt that he ought to sacrifice some- 
thing to keep himself in their connection. He 
regarded them as men who " believed private honor 
to be the foundation of public trust ; that friend- 
ship was no mean step towards patriotism ; that he 
who, in the common intercourse of life, showed he 
regarded somebody besides himself, when he came 
to act in a public situation, might probably consult 
some other interest than his own." He admitted 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 137 

that such confederacies had often " a narrow, bis!"- 
oted, and proscriptive spirit ; " " but, where duty 
renders a critical situation a necessary one," he 
said, " it is our business to keep free from the evils 
attendant upon it ; and not to fly from the situation 
itself. If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome 
air, an officer of the garrison is obliged to be 
attentive to liis health, but he must not desert his 
station." " A party," he declared, " is a body of 
men united for promoting by their joint endeavors 
the national interest upon some particular principle 
in which they are all agreed." " Men thinking 
freely, will," he very well knew, " in particidar in- 
stances, think differently. But still as the greater 
part of the measures which arise in the course of 
public business are related to, or dependent on, 
some great, leading, general principles in govern- 
ment, a man must be peculiarly unfortunate in the 
choice of his political company, if he does not agree 
with them at least nine times in ten. If he does 
not concur in these general principles upon which 
the party is founded, and which necessarily draw 
on a concurrence in their application, he ought 
from the beginning to have chosen some other, 
more conformable to his opinions. When the 
question is in its nature doubtful, or not very 
material, the modesty which becomes an individual, 



138 INTEEPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

and that partiality which becomes a well-chosen 
friendship, will frequently bring on an acquiescence 
in the general sentiment. Thus the disagreement 
will naturally be rare ; it will be only enough to 
indulge freedom, without violating concord, or dis- 
turbing arrangement." 

Certainly there were no party prizes for Burke. 
During much the greater part of his career the 
party to which he adhered was in opposition ; and 
even when in office it had only small favors for 
him. Even his best friends advised against his 
appointment to any of the great offices of state, 
deeming him too intemperate and unpractical. 
And yet the intensity of his devotion to his party 
never abated a jot. Assuredly there was never a 
less selfish allegiance. His devotion was for the 
principles of his party, as he conceived and con- 
structed them. It was a moral and intellectual 
devotion. He had embarked all his spirit's for- 
tunes in the enterprise. Faults he unquestionably 
had, which seemed very grave. He was passionate 
sometimes beyond all bounds : he seriously fright- 
ened cautious and practical men by his haste and 
vehemence in pressing his views for acceptance. 
He was capable of falling, upon occasion, into a 
very frenzy of excitement in the midst of debate, 
when he would often shock moderate men by the 



INTERPBETEE OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 139 

ungoverned license of his language. But liis friends 
were as much to blame for these outbreaks as he 
was. They cut him to the quick by the way in 
which they criticised and misunderstood him. His 
heart was maddened by the pain of their neglect 
of his just claims to their confidence. They seemed 
often to use him without trusting hun, and their 
slights were intolerable to his proud spirit. Prac- 
tically, and upon a narrow scale of expediency, 
they may have been right : perhaps he was 7iot cir- 
cumspect enough to be made a responsible head of 
administration. Unquestionably, too, they loved 
him and meant him no unkindness. But it was 
none the less tragical to treat such a man in such 
a fashion. They may possibly have temporarily 
served their country by denying to Burke full pub- 
lic acknowledgment of his great services ; but they 
cruelly wounded a great spirit, and they hardly 
served mankind. 

They did Burke an injustice, moreover. They 
greatly underrated his practical powers. In such 
offices as he was permitted to hold he showed in 
actual administration the same extraordinary mas- 
tery of masses of detail which was the foundation 
of his unapproachable mastery of general principles 
in his thinking. His thought was always immersed 
in matter, and concrete detail did not confuse him 



140 INTEBPBETEE OF ENGLISH LIBERTY, 

when he touched it any more than it did when he 
meditated upon it. Immediate contact with affairs 
always steadied his judgment. He was habitually 
temperate in the conduct of business. It was only 
in speech and when debating matters that stirred 
the depths of his nature that he gave way to uncal- 
culating fervor. He was intemperate in his emo- 
tions, but seldom in his actions. He could, and 
did, write calm state papers in the very midst and 
heat of parliamentary affairs that subjected him to 
the fiercest excitements. He was eminently capa- 
ble of counsel as well as of invective. 

He served his party in no servile fashion, for all 
he adhered to it with such devotion. He sacrificed 
his intellectual independence as little as his person- 
ahty in taking intimate part in its counsels. He 
gave it principles, indeed, quite as often as he 
accepted principles from it. In the final efforts of 
his life, when he engaged every faculty of his mind 
in the contest that he waged with such magnificent 
wrath against the French revolutionary spirit, he 
gave tone to all Enghsh thought, and direction to 
many of the graver issues of international policy. 
Rejected oftentimes by his party, he has at length 
been accepted by the world. 

His habitual identification with opposition rather 
than with the government gave him a certain ad- 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 141 

vantage. It relaxed party discipline and indulo-ed 
his independence. It gave leave, too, to the better 
efforts of his genius : for in opposition it is princi- 
ples that tell, and Burke was first and last a master 
of principles. Government is a matter of practical 
detail, as well as of general measures ; but the 
criticism of government very naturally becomes a 
matter of the application of general principles, as 
standards rather than as practical means of policy. 
Four questions absorbed the energies of Burke's 
life and must always be associated with his fame. 
These were, the American war for independence ; 
administrative reform in the English home govern- 
ment ; reform in the government of India ; and the 
profound political agitations which attended the 
French Revolution. Other questions he studied, 
deeply pondered, and greatly illuminated, but upon 
these four he expended the full strength of his 
magnificent powers. There is in his treatment of 
these subjects a singular consistency, a very admi- 
rable simplicity of standard. It has been said, and 
it is true, that Burke had no system of political 
philosophy. He was afraid of abstract system in 
political thought, for he perceived that questions 
of government are moral questions, and that ques- 
tions of morals cannot always be squared with the 
rules of logic, but run through as many ranges of 



142 INTEBPBETER OF ENGLISH LIBEETY. 

variety as the circumstances of life itseK. " Man 
acts from adequate motives relative to his interest," 
he said, " and not on metaphysical speculations. 
Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions 
us, and with great weight and propriety, against 
this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in 
moral argimaents, as the most fallacious of all 
sophistry." And yet Burke unquestionably had a 
very definite and determinable system of thought, 
which was none the less a system for being based 
upon concrete, and not upon abstract premises. 
It is said by some writers (even by so eminent a 
writer as Buckle) that in his later years Burke's 
mind lost its balance and that he reasoned as if he 
were insane ; and the proof assigned is, that he, a 
man who loved liberty, violently condemned, not 
the terrors only, — that of course, — but the very 
principles of the French Revolution. But to reason 
thus is to convict one's self of an utter lack of com- 
prehension of Burke's mind and motives : as a very 
brief examination of his course upon the four great 
questions I have mentioned will show. 

From first to last Burke's thought is conserva- 
tive. Let his attitude with regard to America 
serve as an example. He took his stand, as every- 
body knows, with the colonies, against the mother 
country ; but his object was not revolutionary. 



INTEBPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 143 

He did not deny the legal right of England to tax 
the colonies, (we no longer deny it ourselves), but 
he wished to preserve the empire, and he saw that 
to insist upon the right of taxation would be irre- 
vocably to break up the empire, when dealing with 
such a people as the Americans. He pointed out 
the strong and increasing numbers of the colonists, 
their high spirit in enterprise, their jealous love of 
liberty, and the indulgence England had hitherto 
accorded them in the matter of self-government, 
permitting them in effect to become an independ- 
ent people in respect of all their internal affairs ; 
and he declared the result matter for just pride. 
" Whilst we follow them among: the tumblinsf 
mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into 
the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and 
Davis's Straits," he exclaimed, in a famous passage 
of his incomparable speech on Conciliation with 
America, " whilst we are looking for them beneath 
the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced 
into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are 
at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen 
serpent of the South. Falkland Island, which 
seemed too remote and romantic an object for the 
grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting 
place in the progress of their \dctorious industry. 
Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to 



144 INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. 
We know that whilst some of them draw the line 
and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, 
others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic 
game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what 
is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not 
witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of 
Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dex- 
terous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, 
ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy 
industry to the extent to which it has been pushed 
by this recent people, — a people who are still, as 
it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened 
into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate 
these things, — when I know that the colonies in 
general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, 
and that they are not squeezed into this happy 
form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious 
government, but that, through a wise and salutary 
neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to 
take her own way to perfection, — when I reflect 
upon these effects, when I see how profitable they 
have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, 
and all the presumption in the wisdom of human 
contrivances melt and die away within me, — my 
rigor relents, — I pardon something to the spirit 
of liberty." 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 145 

" I think it necessary," he insisted, " to consider 
distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circum- 
stances of the object we have before us : because, 
after all our struggle, whether we will or not, we 
must govern America according to that nature and 
those circumstances, and not according to our own 
imaginations, not according to abstract ideas of 
right, by no means according to mere general 
theories of government, the resort to which appears 
to me, in our present situation, no better than 
arrant trifling." To attempt to force such a people 
would be a course of idle folly. Force, he declared, 
would not only be an odious " but a feeble instru- 
ment, for preserving a people so numerous, so 
active, so growing, so spirited as this, in a profita- 
ble and subordinate connection with " England. 

" First, Sir," he cried, " permit me to observe, 
that the use of force alone is but temporary. It 
may subdue for a moment ; but it does not remove 
the ne'cessity of subduing again : and a nation is 
not governed which is perpetually to be conquered. 

" My next objection is its uncertainty. Terror 
is not always the effect of force, and an armament 
is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are 
without resource: for, conciliation failing, force 
remains; but, force failing, no further hope of 
reconciliation is left. Power and authority are 



\ 



\ 



146 INTEBPBETEE OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

sometimes bought by kindness ; but they can never 
be begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated 
violence. 

" A further objection to force is, that you impair 
the object by your very endeavors to preserve it. 
The thing you fought for is not the thing you 
recover, but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and con- 
sumed in the contest. Nothing less will content 
me than whole America, I do not choose to con- 
sume its strength along with our own ; for in all 
parts it is the British strength I consume. . . . 
Let me add, that I do not choose wholly to break 
the American spirit ; because it is the spirit that 
has made the country. 

" Lastly, we have no sort of experience in favor 
of force as an instrument in the rule of our colonies. 
Their growth and their utility has been owing to 
methods altogether different. Our ancient indul- 
gence has been said to be pursued to a fault. It 
may be so ; but we know, if feeling is evidence, 
that our fault was more tolerable than our attempt 
to mend it, and our sin far more salutary than our 
penitence." 

" Obedience is what makes government," " free- 
dom, and not servitude, is the cure of anarchy," 
and you cannot insist upon one rule of obedience 
for Englishmen in America while you jealously 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 147 

maintain another for Englishmen in England. 
" For, in order to prove that the Americans have 
no right to their liberties, we are every day en- 
deavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve 
the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the 
Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to 
depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we 
never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them 
in debate, without attacking some of those princi- 
ples, or deriding some of those feelings, for which 
our ancestors have shed their blood." " The ques- 
tion with me is, not whether you have a right to 
render your people miserable, but whether it is not 
your interest to make them happy. It is not what 
a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, 
reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. . . . 
Such is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute 
necessity of keeping up the concord of this empire 
by a unity of spirit, though in a diversity of opera- 
tions, that, if I were sure that the colonists had, at 
their leaving this country, sealed a regular com- 
pact of servitude, that they had solemnly abjured 
all the rights of citizens, that they had made a vow 
to renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their 
posterity to all generations, yet I should hold my- 
self obliged to conform to the temper I found uni- 
versally prevalent in my own day, and to govern 



148 INTEBPEETEB OF ENGLISH LIBEBTY. 

two million of men, impatient of servitude, on the 
principles of freedom. I am not determining a 
point of law; I am restoring tranquillity : and the 
general character and situation of a people must 
determine what sort of government is fitted for 
them. That point nothing else can or ought to 
determine." " All government, indeed every hu- 
man benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every 
prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. 
We balance inconveniences ; we give and take ; 
we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others ; 
and we choose rather to be happy citizens than 
subtle disputants." " Magnanimity in politics is 
not seldom the truest wisdom ; and a great empire 
and little minds go ill together." 

Here you have the whole spirit of the man, and 
in part a view of his eminently practical system of 
thought. The view is completed when you advance 
with him to other subjects of policy. He pressed 
with all his energy for radical reforms in adminis- 
tration, but he earnestly opposed every change that 
might touch the structure of the constitution itself. 
He sought to secure the integrity of Parliament, 
not by changing the system of representation, but 
by cutting out all roots of corruption. He pressed 
forward with the most ardent in all plans of just 
reform, but he held back with the most conserva- 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 149 

tive from all propositions of radical change. " To 
innovate is not to reform," he declared, and there 
is " a marked distinction between change and re- 
formation. The former alters the substance of the 
objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essen- 
tial good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed 
to them. Change is novelty ; and whether it is to 
operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, 
or whether it may not contradict the very princi- 
ple upon which reformation is desired, cannot cer- 
tainly be known beforehand. Reform is not a 
change in the substance or in the primary modifi- 
cation of the object, but a direct application of a 
remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as 
that is removed, all is sure. It stops there ; and 
if it fails, the substance which underwent the oper- 
ation, at the very worst, is but where it was." This 
is the governing motive of his immense labors to 
accomplish radical economical reform in the ad- 
ministration of the government. He was not seek- 
ing economy merely ; to husband the resources of 
the country was no more than a means to an end, 
and that end was, to preserve the constitution in its 
purity. He believed that Parliament was not truly 
representative of the people because so many place- 
men found seats in it, and because so many mem- 
bers who might have been independent were bought 



150 INTEBPEETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

by the too abundant favors of the Court. Cleanse 
Parliament of this corruption, and it would be re- 
stored to something like its pristine excellence as 
an instrument of liberty. 

He dreaded to see the franchise extended and 
the House of Commons radically made over in its 
constitution. It had never been intended to be 
merely the people's House. It had been intended 
to hold all the elements of the state that were not 
to be found in the House of Lords or the Court. 
He conceived it to be the essential object of the 
\ constitution to establish a balanced and just inter- 
j course between the several forces of an ancient 
I society, and it was well that that balance should be 
preserved even in the House of Commons, rather 
than give perilous sweep to a single set of interests. 
" These opposed and conflicting interests," he said 
to his French correspondent, " which you considered 
as so great a blemish in your old and in our pres- 
ent Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all 
precipitate resolutions. They render deliberation 
a matter, not of choice, but of necessity ; they 
make all change a subject of compromise^ which 
naturally begets moderation ; they produce tern- 
'peram.ents^ preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, 
unqualified reformations, and rendering all the 
headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 151 

or in the many, forever impracticable. Through 
that diversity of members and interests, general 
liberty had as many securities as there are separate 
views in the several orders ; whilst by pressing 
down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, 
the separate parts would have been prevented from 
warping and starting from their allotted places." 
" We wish," he said, " to derive all we possess as 
an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that 
body and stock of experience we have taken care 
not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the 
original plant." " This idea of a liberal descent 
inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, 
which prevents that upstart insolence almost in- 
evitably adhering to and disgracing those who are 
the first acquirers of any .distinction. By this 
means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It 
carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a 
pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its 
bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gal- 
lery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its 
records, evidences, and titles. We procure rever- 
ence to our civil institutions on the principle upon 
which Nature teaches us to revere individual men : 
on account of their age, and on account of those 
?rom whom they are descended." 

" When the useful parts of an old establishment 



152 INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted to 
what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, perse- 
vering attention, various powers of comparison 
and combination, and the resources of an under- 
standing fruitful in expedients are to be exercised ; 
they are to be exercised in a continued conflict 
with the combined force of opposite vices, with the 
obstinacy that rejects all improvement, and the 
levity that is fatigued and disgusted with every- 
thing of which it is in possession. . . , Political 
arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to 
be only wrought by social means. There mind 
must conspire with mind. Time is required to 
produce that union of minds which alone can pro- 
duce all the good we aim at. Our patience will 
achieve more than our force. If I might venture 
to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in 
Paris, — I mean to experience, — I should tell you 
that in my course I have known, and, according to 
my measure, have co(5perated with great men ; and 
I have never yet seen any plan which has not been 
mended by the observations of those who were 
much inferior in understanding to the person who 
took the lead in the business. By a slow, but well 
sustained progress, the effect of each step is 
watched ; the good or ill success of the first gives 
light to us in the second ; and so, from light to light, 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 153 

we are conducted with safety, through the whole 
series. . . . We are enabled to unite into a consis- 
tent whole the various anomalies and contending 
principles that are found in the minds and affairs 
of men. From hence arises, not an excellence in 
simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in 
composition. Where the great interests of man- 
kind are concerned through a long succession of 
generations, that succession ought to be admitted 
into some share in the counsels which are so deeply 
to affect them." 

It is not possible to escape deep conviction of 
the wisdom of these reflections. They penetrate to 
the heart of all practicable methods of reform. 
Burke was doubtless too timid, and in practical 
judgment often mistaken. Measures which in 
reality would operate only as salutary and needed 
reformations he feared because of the element of 
change that was in them. He erred when he sup- 
posed that progress can in all its stages be made 
without changes which seem to go even to the sub- 
stance. But, right or wrong, his philosophy did 
not come to him of a sudden and only at the end 
of his life, when he found France desolated and 
England threatened with madness for love of rev- 
olutionary principles of change. It is the key to 
his thought everywhere, and through all his life. 



154 INTEBPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

It is the key (wliieh many of his critics have 
never found) to his position with regard to the 
revolution in France. He was roused to that 
fierce energy of opposition in which so many have 
thought that they detected madness, not so much 
because of his deep disgust to see brutal and 
ignorant men madly despoil an ancient and honor- 
able monarchy, as because he saw the spirit of 
these men cross the Channel and find lodgment 
in England, even among statesmen like Fox, who 
had been his own close friends and companions in 
thought and policy ; not so much because he loved 
France as because he feared for England. For 
England he had Shakespeare's love : 

" That fortress built by nature for herself 
Against infection and the hand of war ; 
That happy breed of men, that little world, 
That precious stone set in the silver sea, 
Which serves it in the office of a wall, 
Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
Against the envy of less happier lands ; 
That blessed plot, that earth, that realm, that England." 

'T was to keep out infection and to preserve such 
precious stores of manly tradition as had made that 
little world " the envy of less happier lands " that 
Burke sounded so effectually that extraordinary 
alarm against the revolutionary spirit that was 
racking France from throne to cottage. Let us 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 155 

admit, if you will, that with reference to France 
herself he was mistaken. Let us say that when he 
admired the institutions which she was then sweep- 
ing away he was yielding to sentiment, and imagin- 
ing France as perfect as the beauty of the sweet 
queen he had seen in her radiant youth. Let us 
concede that he did not understand the condition 
of France, and therefore did not see how inevitable 
that terrible revolution was : that in this case, too, 
the wages of sin was death. He was not defend- 
ing France, if you look to the bottom of it ; he 
was defending England : — and the things he 
hated are truly hateful. He hated the French rev- 
olutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for 
free men. And that philosophy is in fact radi- 
cally evil and corrupting. No state can ever be 
conducted on its principles. For it holds that 
government is a matter of contract and dehberate 
arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of 
habit, bound together by innumerable threads of 
association, scarcely one of which has been deliber- 
ately placed. It holds that the object of government 
is liberty, whereas the true object of government 
is justice; not the advantage of one class, even 
though that class constitute the majority, but right 
equity in the adjustment of the interests of all 
classes. It assumes that government can be made 



156 INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

over at will, but assumes it without the slightest 
historical foundation. For governments have 
never been successfully and permanently changed 
except by slow modification operating from genera- 
tion to generation. It contradicted every principle 
that had been so laboriously brought to light in 
the slow stages of the growth of liberty in the only 
land in which liberty had then grown to great pro- 
portions. The history of England is a continuous 
thesis against revolution ; and Burke would have 
been no true Englishman, had he not roused him- 
self, even fanatically, if there were need, to keep 
such puerile doctrine out. 

If you think his fierceness was madness, look 
how he conducted the trial against Warren Has- 
tings during those same years : with what patience, 
with what steadiness in business, with what temper, 
with what sane and balanced attention to detail, 
with what statesmanlike purpose ! Note, likewise, 
that his thesis is the same in the one undertaking 
as in the other. He was applying the same princi- 
ples to the case of France and to the case of India 
that he had applied to the case of the colonies. 
He meant to save the empire, not by changing its 
constitution, as was the method in France, and so 
shaking every foundation in order to dislodge an 
abuse, but by administering it uprightly and in a 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 157 

liberal spirit. He was persuaded ''that govern- 
ment was a practical thing, made for the happiness 
of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of 
uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary poli- 
ticians. Our business," he said, " was to rule, not 
to wrangle ; and it would be a poor compensation 
that we had triumphed in a dispute, whilst we had 
lost an empire." The monarchy must be saved 
and the constitution vindicated by keeping the 
empire pure in all parts, even in the remotest 
provinces. Hastings must be crushed in order 
that the world might know that no English gov- 
ernor could afford to be unjust. Good govern- 
ment, like all virtue, he deemed to be a practical 
habit of conduct, and not a matter of constitutional 
• structure. It is a great ideal, a thoroughly English 
ideal ; and it constitutes the leading thought of aU 
Burke's career. 

In short, as I began by saying, this man, an 
Irishman, speaks the best English thought upon the 
essential questions of politics. He is thoroughly, 
characteristically, and to the bottom English in all 
his thinking. He is more liberal than Englishmen 
in his treatment of Irish questions, of course ; for 
he understands them, as no Englishman of his 
generation did. But for all that he remains the 
chief spokesman for England in the utterance of 



158 INTERPBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY, 

the fundamental ideals wliich have governed the 
action of Englishmen in politics. " All the ancient, 
honest, juridical principles and institutions of Eng- 
land," such was his idea, "are so many clogs to 
check and retard the headlong course of violence 
and oppression. They were invented for this one 
good purpose, that what was not just shoidd not be 
convenientJ^ This is fundamental English doctrine. 
English liberty has consisted in making it unpleas- 
ant for those who were unjust, and thus getting 
them in the habit of being just for the sake of a 
modus vivendi. Burke is the apostle of the great 
English gospel of Expediency. 

The poHtics of English-speaking peoples has 
never been speculative ; it has always been pro- 
foundly practical and utilitarian. Speculative pol- 
itics treats men and situations as they are supposed 
to be ; practical politics treats them (upon no gen- 
eral plan, but in detail) as they are found to be at 
the moment of actual contact. With reference to 
America Burke argues : No matter what your legal 
right in the case, it is not expedient to treat 
America as you propose : a numerous and spirited 
people like the colonists will not submit ; and your 
experiment will cost you your colonies. In the 
case of administrative reform, again, it is the 
higher sort of expediency he urges : If you wish 



INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 159 

to keep your government from revolution, keep it 
from corruption, and by making it pure render it 
permanent. To tlie French he says, It is not expe- 
dient to destroy thus recklessly these ancient parts 
of your constitution. How will you replace them ? 
How will you conduct affairs at all after you shall 
have deprived yourselves of all balance and of all 
old counsel? It is both better and easier to reform 
than to tear down and reconstruct. 

This is unquestionably the message of English- 
men to the world, and Burke utters it with incom- 
parable eloquence. A man of sensitive imagination 
and elevated moral sense, of a wide knowledge and 
capacity for affairs, he stood in the midst of the 
English nation speaking its moral judgments upon 
affairs, its character in political action, its purposes 
of freedom, equity, wide and equal progress. It is 
the immortal charm of his speech and manner that 
gives permanence to his works. Though his life 
was devoted to affairs with a constant and unalter- 
able passion, the radical features of Burke's mind 
were literary. He was a man of books, without 
being under the dominance of what others had 
written. He got knowledge out of books and the 
abundance of matter his mind craved to work its 
constructive and imaginative effects upon. It is 
singfular how devoid of all direct references to 



160 INTEBTBETEB OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 

books his writings are. The materials of his 
thought never reappear in the same form in which 
he obtained them. They have been smelted and 
recoined. They have come under the drill and 
inspiration of a great constructive mind, have 
caught life and taken structure from it. Burke is 
not literary because he takes from books, but be- 
cause he makes books, transmuting what he writes 
upon into literature. It is this inevitable literary 
quality, this sure mastery of style, that mark the 
man, as much as his thought itself. He is a master 
in the use of the great style. Every sentence, too, 
is steeped in the colors of an extraordinary imag- 
ination. The movement takes your breath and 
quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the 
matter rejuvenate your faculties. 

And yet the thought, too, is quite as imperish- 
able as its incomparable vehicle. 

"The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen; 
The voice most echoed by consenting men ; 
The soul which answered best to all well said 
By others, and which most requital made ; 
Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome, 
Returning all her music with his own ; 
In whom, with nature, study claimed a part, 
And yet who to himself owed all his art." 



VI. 

THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

"Give us the facts, and nothing but the facts," 
is the sharp injunction of our age to its historians. 
Upon the face of it, an eminently reasonable re- 
quirement. To tell the truth simply, openly, with- 
out reservation, is the unimpeachable fii'st principle 
of all right dealing ; and historians have no license 
to be quit of it. Unquestionably they must tell us 
the truth, or else get themselves enrolled among a 
very undesirable class of persons, not often frankly 
named in polite society. But the thing is by no 
means so easy as it looks. The truth of history is 
a very complex and very occult matter. It consists 
of things which are invisible as well as of things 
which are visible. It is fuU of secret motives, and 
of a chance interplay of trivial and yet determining 
circumstances ; it is shot through with transient 
passions, and broken athwart here and there by 
what seem cruel accidents ; it cannot all be reduced 
to statistics or newspaper items or official recorded 
statements. And so it turns out, when the actual 
test of experiment is made, that the historian must 



162 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

have something more than a good conscience, must 
he something more than a good man. He must 
have an eye to see the truth ; and nothing but a 
very catholic imagination will serve to illuminate 
his matter for him: nothing less than keen and 
steady insight will make even illumination yield 
him the truth of what he looks upon. Even when 
he has seen the truth, only half his work is done, 
and that not the more difficult half. He must 
then make others see it just as he does : only when 
he has done that has he told the truth. What an 
art of penetrative phrase and just selection must 
he have to take others into the light in which he 
stands ! Their dullness, their ignorance, their pre- 
possessions, are to be overcome and driven in, like 
a routed troop, upon the truth. The thing is infi- 
nitely difficult. The skill and strategy of it cannot 
be taught. And so historians take another way, 
which is easier : they tell part of the truth, — the 
part most to their taste, or most suitable to their 
talents, — and obtain readers to their liking among 
those of similar tastes and talents to their own. 

We have our individual preferences in history, 
as in every other sort of literature. And there are 
histories to every taste : histories full of the piquant 
details of personal biography, histories that blaze 
with the splendors of courts and resound with 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 163 

drum and trumpet, and histories that run upon the 
humbler but greater levels of the life of the people ; 
colorless histories, so passionless and so lacking in 
distinctive mark or motive that they might have 
been set up out of a dictionary without the inter- 
vention of an author, and partisan histories, so 
warped and violent in every judgment that no 
reader not of the historian's own party can stomach 
them ; histories of economic development, and his- 
tories that speak only of politics ; those that tell 
nothing but what it is pleasant and interesting to 
know, and those that tell nothing at all that one 
cares to remember. One must be of a new and 
unheard-of taste not to be suited among them all. 

The trouble is, after all, that men do not invari- 
ably find the truth to their taste, and will often 
deny it when they hear it ; and the historian has to 
do much more than keep his own eyes clear : he 
has also to catch and hold the eye of his reader. 
'Tis a nice art, as much intellectual as moral. 
How shall he take the palate of his reader at un- 
awares, and get the unpalatable facts down his 
throat along with the palatable ? Is there no way 
in which aU the truth may be made to hold together 
in a narrative so strongly knit and so harmoniously 
colored that no reader will have either the wish or 
the skiU to tear its patterns asunder, and men will 



164 THE TBUTH OF THE MATTEB. 

take it all, immarred and as it stands, rather tlian * 
miss the zest of it? 

It is evident the thing cannot be done by the 
" dispassionate " annalist. The old chroniclers, 
whom we relish, were not dispassionate. We love 
some of them for their sweet quaintness, some for 
their childlike credulity, some for their delicious 
inconsequentiality. But our modern chroniclers 
are not so. They are, above all things else, know- 
ing, thoroughly informed, subtly sophisticated. 
They would not for the world contribute any spice 
of their own to the narrative ; and they are much 
too watchful, circumspect, and dutiful in their care 
to keep their method pure and untouched by any 
thought of theirs to let us catch so much as a 
glimpse of the chronicler underneath the chronicle. 
Their purpose is to give simply the facts, eschewing 
art, and substituting a sort of monumental index 
and table of the world's events. 

The trouble is that men refuse to be made any 
wiser by such means. Though they wHl readily 
enough let their eyes linger upon a monument of 
art, they will heedlessly pass by a mere monument 
of industry. It suggests nothing to them. The 
materials may be suitable enough, but the handling 
of them leaves them dead and commonplace. An 
interesting circumstance thus comes to light. It 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 165 

is nothing less than this, that the facts do not of 
themselves constitute the truth. The truth is ab- 
stract, not concrete. It is the just idea, the right 
revelation of what things mean. It is evoked only 
by such arrangements and orderings of facts as 
suggest interpretations. The chronological arrange- 
ment of events, for example, may or may not be 
the arrangement which most surely brings the 
truth of the narrative to light ; and the best ar- 
rangement is always that which displays, not the 
facts themselves, but the subtle and else invisible 
forces that lurk in the events and in the minds of 
men, — forces for which events serve only as lasting 
and dramatic words of utterance. Take an instance. 
How are you to enable men to know the truth 
with regard to a period of revolution ? Will you 
give them simply a calm statement of recorded 
events, simply a quiet, unaccentuated narrative of 
what actually happened, written in a monotone, 
and verified by quotations from authentic docu- 
ments of the time? You may save yourself the 
trouble. As well make a pencil sketch in outline 
of a raging conflagration ; write upon one portion 
of it "flame," upon another "smoke;" here "town 
hall, where the fire started," and there " spot where 
fireman was kiUed." It is a chart, not a picture. 
Even if you made a veritable picture of it, you 



166 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTEB. 

could give only part of the trutli so long as you 
confined yourself to black and white. Where 
would be all the wild and terrible colors of the 
scene : the red and tawny flame ; the masses of 
smoke, carrying the dull glare of the fire to the 
very skies, like a great signal banner thrown to the 
winds ; the hot and frightened faces of the crowd ; 
the crimsoned gables down the street, with the 
faint light of a lamp here and there gleaming 
white from some hastily opened casement? With- 
out the colors your picture is not true. No inven- 
tory of items will even represent the truth : the 
fuller and more minute you make your inventory, 
the more will the truth be obscured. The little 
details will take up as much space in the statement 
as the great totals into which they are summed up ; 
and, the proportions being false, the whole is false. 
Truth, fortunately, takes its own revenge. No one 
is deceived. The reader of the chronicle lays it 
aside. It lacks verisimilitude. He cannot realize 
how any of the things spoken of can have hap- 
pened. He goes elsewhere to find, if he may, a 
real picture of the time, and perhaps finds one that 
is wholly fictitious. No wonder the grave and 
monk-like chronicler sighs. He of course wrote to 
be read, and not merely for the manual exercise of 
it ; and when he sees readers turn away his heart 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 167 

misgives him for his fellow-men. Is it as it always 
was, that they do not wish to know the truth ? 
Alas ! good eremite, men do not seek the truth as 
they should ; but do you know what the truth is ? 
It is a thing ideal, displayed by the just proportion 
of events, revealed in form and color, dumb till 
facts be set in syllables, articulated into words, put 
together into sentences, swung with proper tone 
and cadence. It is not revolutions only that have 
color. Nothing in human life is without it. In a 
monochrome you can depict nothing but a single 
incident ; in a monotone you cannot often carry 
truth beyond a single sentence. Only by art in all 
its variety can you depict as it is the various face 
of life. 

Yes ; but what sort of art ? There is here a 
wide field of choice. Shall we go back to the art 
of which Macaulay was so great a master ? We 
could do worse. It must be a great art that can 
make men lay aside the novel and take up the his- 
tory, to find there, in very fact, the movement and 
drama of life. What Macaulay does well he does 
incomparably. Who else can mass the details as 
he does, and yet not mar or obscure, but only 
heighten, the effect of the picture as a whole? 
Who else can bring so amazing a profusion of 
knowledge within the strait limits of a simple plan. 



168 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

nowhere encumbered, everywhere free and obvious 
in its movement ? How sure the strokes, and how 
bold and vivid the result ! Yet when we have laid 
the book aside, when the charm and the excitement 
of the telling narrative have worn off, when we 
have lost step with the swinging gait at which the 
style goes, when the details have faded from our 
recollection, and we sit removed and thoughtful, 
with only the greater outlines of the story sharp 
upon our minds, a deep misgiving and dissatisfac- 
tion take possession of us. We are no longer 
young, and we are chagrined that we should have 
been so pleased and taken with the glitter and 
color and mere life of the picture. Let boys be 
cajoled by rhetoric, we cry ; men must look deeper. 
What of the judgment of this facile and eloquent 
man ? Can we agree with him, when he is not 
talking and the charm is gone ? What shall we 
say of his assessment of men and measures? Is 
he just ? Is he himself in possession of the whole 
truth ? Does he open the matter to us as it was ? 
Does he not, rather, rule us like an advocate, and 
make himself master of our judgments ? 

Then it is that we become aware that there were 
two Macaulays : Macaulay the artist, with an ex- 
quisite gift for telling a story, filling his pages with 
little vignettes it is impossible to forget, fixing 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 169 

these with an inimitable art upon the surface of 
a narrative that did not need the ornament they 
gave it, so strong and large and adequate was it ; 
and Macaulay the Whig, subtly turning narrative 
into argument, and making history the vindication 
of a party. The mighty narrative is a great engine 
of proof. It is not told for its own sake. It is 
evidence summed up in order to justify a judg- 
ment. We detect the tone of the advocate, and 
though if we are just we must deem him honest, 
we cannot deem him safe. The great story-teller 
is discredited; and, willingly or unwillingly, we 
reject the guide who takes it upon himself to de- 
termine for us what we shall see. That, we feel 
sure, cannot be true which makes of so complex a 
history so simple a thesis for the judgment. There 
is art here ; but it is the art of special pleading, 
misleading even to the pleader. 

If not Macaulay, what master shall we follow ? 
Shall our historian not have his convictions, and 
enforce them? Shall he not be our guide, and 
speak, if he can, to our spirits as well as to our 
understandings ? Readers are a poor jury. They 
need enlightenment as well as information ; the 
matter must be interpreted to them as well as re- 
lated. There are moral facts as well as material, 
and the one sort must be as plainly told as the 



170 THE TBUTH OF THE MATTER. 

other. Of what service is it that the historian 
should have insight if we are not to know how the 
matter stands in his view? If he refrain from 
judgment, he may deceive us as much as he 
would were his judgment wrong ; for we must 
have enlightenment, — that is his function. We 
would not set him up merely to tell us tales, but 
also to display to us characters, to open to us the 
moral and intent of the matter. Were the men 
sincere ? Was the policy righteous ? We have but 
just now seen that the " facts " lie deeper than the 
mere visible things that took place, that they in- 
volve the moral and motive of the play. Shall 
not these, too, be brought to light ? 

Unquestionably every sentence of true history 
must hold a judgment in solution. All cannot be 
told. If it were possible to teU all, it would take 
as long to write history as to enact it, and we should 
have to postpone the reading of it to the leisure 
of the next world. A few facts must be selected 
for the narrative, the great majority left unnoted. 
But the selection — for what purpose it is to be 
made? For the purpose of conveying an impression 
of the truth. Where shall you find a more radical 
process of judgment? The "essential" facts taken, 
the " unessential " left out ! Why, you may make 
the picture what you will, and in any case it must 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 171 

be the express image of the historian's fundamental 
judgments. It is his purpose, or should be, to give 
a true impression of his theme as a whole, — to 
show it, not lying upon his page in an open and 
dispersed analysis, but set close in intimate syn- 
thesis, every line, every stroke, every bulk even, 
omitted which does not enter of very necessity into 
a single and unified image of the truth. 

It is in this that the writing of history differs, 
and differs very radically, from the statement of 
the results of original research. The wi'iting of 
history must be based upon original research and 
authentic record, but it can no more be directly 
constructed by the piecing together of bits of 
original research than by the mere reprinting to- 
gether of state documents. Individual research 
furnishes us, as it were, with the private documents 
and intimate records without which the public 
archives are incomplete and unintelligible. But 
by themselves these are wholly out of perspective. 
It is the consolation of those who produce them to 
make them so. They would lose heart were they 
forbidden to regard all facts as of equal importance. 
It is facts they are after, and only facts, — facts 
for their own sake, and without regard to their 
several importance. These are their ore, — very 
precious ore, — which they are concerned to get 



172 THE TBUTH OF THE MATTER. 

out, not. to refine. They have no direct concern 
with what may afterwards be done at the mint or 
in the goldsmith's shop. They will even boast that 
they care not for the beauty of the ore, and are 
indifferent how, or in what shape, it may become 
an article of commerce. Much of it is thrown 
away in the nice processes of manufacture, and you 
shall not distinguish the product of the several 
mines in the coin, or the cup, or the salver. 

The historian must, indeed, himself be an inves- 
tigator. He must know good ore from bad ; must 
distinguish fineness, quality, genuineness ; must stop 
to get out of the records for himself what he lacks 
for the perfection of his work. But for all that, 
he must know and stand ready to do every part of 
his task like a master workman, recognizing and 
testing every bit of stuff he uses. Standing sure, 
a man of science as well as an artist, he must take 
and use all of his equipment for the sake of his 
art, — not to display his materials, but to subordi- 
nate and transform them in his effort to make, by 
every touch and cunning of hand and tool, the per- 
fect image of what he sees, the very truth of his 
seer's vision of the world. The true historian 
works always for the whole impression, the truth 
with unmarred proportions, unexaggerated parts, 
undistorted visage. He has no favorite parts of 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 173 

the story which he boasts are bits of his own, but 
loves only the whole of it, the full and unspoiled 
image of the day of which he writes, the crowded 
and yet consistent details which carry, without ob- 
trusion of themselves, the large features of the 
time. Any exaggeration of the parts makes aU 
the picture false, and the work is to do over. 
" Test every bit of material," runs the artist's rule, 
" and then forget the material ; " forget its origin 
and the dross from which it has been freed, and 
think only and always of the great thing you 
would make of it, the pattern and form in which 
you would lose and merge it. That is its only 
high use. 

'T is a pity to see how even the greatest minds 
will often lack the broad and catholic vision with 
which the just historian must look upon men and 
affairs. There is Carlyle, with his shrewd and see- 
ing eye, his unmatched capacity to assess strong 
men and set the scenery for tragedy or intrigue, his 
breathless ardor for great events, his amazing flashes 
of insight, and his unlooked-for steady light of oc- 
casional narrative. The whole matter of what he 
writes is too dramatic. Surely history was not all 
enacted so hotly, or with so passionate a rush of 
men upon the stage. Its quiet scenes must have 
been longer, not mere pauses and interludes while 



174 THE TBUTH OF THE MATTER. 

the tragic parts were being made up. There is not 
often ordinary sunlight upon the page. The lights 
burn now wan, now lurid. Men are seen disquieted 
and turbulent, and may be heard in husky cries or 
rude, untimely jests. We do not recognize our 
own world, but seem to see another such as ours 
might become if peopled by like uneasy Titans. 
Incomparable to tell of days of storm and revolu- 
tion, speaking like an oracle and familiar of des- 
tiny and fate, searching the hearts of statesmen 
and conquerors with an easy insight in every day of 
action, this peasant seer cannot give us the note of 
piping times of peace, or catch the tone of slow 
industry ; watches ships come and go at the docks, 
hears freight- vans thunder along the iron highways 
of the modern world, and loaded trucks lumber 
heavily through the crowded city streets, with a 
hot disdain of commerce, prices current, the hag- 
gling of the market, the smug ease of material 
comfort bred in a trading age. There is here no 
broad and catholic vision, no wise tolerance, no 
various power to know, to sympathize, to interpret. 
The great seeing imagination of the man lacks that 
pure radiance in which things are seen steadily and 
seen whole. 

It is not easy, to say truth, to find actual exam- 
ples when you are constructing the ideal historian, 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 175 

the man with the vision and the faculty divine 
to see affairs justly and tell of them completely. 
If you are not satisfied with this passionate and 
intolerant seer of Chelsea, whom will you choose ? 
Shall it be Gibbon, whom all praise, but so few 
read ? He, at any rate, is passionless, it would 
appear. But who could write epochal history 
with passion ? All hot humors of the mind must, 
assuredly, cool when spread at large upon so vast 
a surface. One must feel like a sort of minor 
providence in traversing that great tract of world 
history, and catch in spite of one's self the gait and 
manner of a god. This stately procession of gener- 
ations moves on remote from the ordinary levels of 
our human sympathy. 'T is a wide view of nations 
and peoples and dynasties, and a world shaken by 
the travail of new births. There is here no scale 
by which to measure the historian of the sort we 
must look to see handle the ordinary matter of 
national history. The " Decline and Fall " stands 
impersonal, like a monument. We shall reverence 
it, but we shall not imitate it. 

If we look away from Gibbon, exclude Carlyle, 
and question Macaulay ; if we put the investigators 
on one side as not yet historians, and the deliber- 
ately picturesque and entertaining raconteurs as 
not yet investigators, we naturally turn, I suppose, 



176 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

to such a man as John Richard Green, at once the 
patient scholar, — who shall adequately say how 
nobly patient ? — and the rare artist, working so 
like a master in the difficult stuffs of a long na- 
tional history. The very life of the man is as beau- 
tiful as the moving sentences he wrote with so sub- 
tle a music in the cadence. We know whence the 
fine moral elevation of tone came that sounds 
through all the text of his great narrative. True, 
not everybody is satisfied with our doctor angelicus. 
Some doubt he is too ornate. Others are troubled 
that he should sometimes be inaccurate. Some are 
willing to use his history as a manual ; while others 
cannot deem him satisfactory for didactic uses, 
hesitate how they shall characterize him, and quit 
the matter vaguely with saying that what he wrote 
is " at any rate literature." Can there be some- 
thing lacking in Green, too, notwithstanding he 
was impartial, and looked with purged and open 
eyes upon the whole unbroken life of his people, — 
notwithstanding he saw the truth and had the art 
and mastery to make others see it as he did, in all 
its breadth and multiplicity ? 

Perhaps even this great master of narrative 
lacks variety — as who does not? His method, 
whatever the topic, is ever the same. His sen- 
tences, his paragraphs, his chapters are pitched 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 177 

one and all in the same key. It is a very fine and 
moving key. Many an elevated strain and rich 
harmony commend it alike to the ear and to the 
imagination. It is employed with an easy mastery, 
and is made to serve to admiration a wide range 
of themes. But it is always the same key, and 
some themes it will not serve. An infinite variety 
plays through all history. Every scene has its 
own air and singularity. Incidents cannot all be 
rightly set in the narrative if all be set ahke. As 
the scene shifts, the tone of the narrative must 
change : the narrator's choice of incident and his 
choice of words ; the speed and method of his sen- 
tence ; his own thought, even, and point of view. 
Surely his battle pages must resound with the 
tramp of armies and the fearful din and rush of 
war. In peace he must catch by turns the hum of 
industry, the bustle of the street, the calm of the 
country-side, the tone of parliamentary debate, the 
fancy, the ardor, the argument of poets and seers 
and quiet students. Snatches of song run along 
with sober purpose and strenuous endeavor through 
every nation's story. Coarse men and refined, 
mobs and ordered assemblies, science and mad im- 
pulse, storm and calm, are all alike ingredients of 
the various life. It is not all epic. There is rough 
comedy and brutal violence. The drama can scarce 



178 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

be given any strict, unbroken harmony of incident, 
any close logical sequence of act or nice unity of 
scene. To pitch it all in one key, therefore, is to 
mistake the significance of the infinite play of 
varied circumstance that makes up the yearly 
movement of a people's life. 

It would be less than just to say that Green's 
pages do not reveal the variety of English life the 
centuries through. It is his glory, indeed, as all 
the world knows, to have broadened and diversified 
the whole scale of English history. Nowhere else 
within the compass of a single book can one find 
so many sides of the great English story displayed 
with so deep and just an appreciation of them all, 
or of the part of each in making up the whole. 
Green is the one man among English historians 
who has restored the great fabric of the nation's 
history where its architecture was obscure, and its 
details were likely to be lost or forgotten. Once 
more, because of him, the vast Gothic structure 
stands complete, its majesty and firm grace en- 
hanced at every point by the fine tracery of its 
restored details. 

Where so much is done, it is no doubt unreason- 
able to ask for more. But the very architectural 
symmetry of this great book imposes a limitation 
upon it. It is full of a certain sort of variety ; but 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 179 

it IS only the variety of a great plan's detail, not 
the variety of English life. The noble structure 
obeys its own laws rather than the laws of a peo- 
ple's fortunes. It is a monument conceived and 
reared by a consummate artist, and it wears upon 
its every line some part of the image it was meant 
to bear, of a great, complex, aspiring national exis- 
tence. But, though it symbolizes, it does not con- 
tain that life. It has none of the irregularity of 
the actual experiences of men and communities. 
It explains, but it does not contain, their variety. 
The history of every nation has certainly a plan 
which the historian must see and reproduce ; but 
he must reconstruct the people's life, not merely 
expound it. The scope of his method must be as 
great as the variety of his subject ; it must change 
with each change of mood, respond to each varying 
impulse in the great process of events. No rigor 
of a stately style must be suffered to exclude the 
lively touches of humor or the rude sallies of 
strength that mark it everywhere. The plan of 
the telling must answer to the plan of the fact, — 
must be as elastic as the topics are mobile. The 
matter should rule the plan, not the plan the mat- 
ter. 

The ideal is infinitely difficult, if, indeed, it be 
possible to any man not Shakespearean ; but the 



180 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

difficulty of attaining it is often unnecessarily en- 
hanced. Ordinarily the historian's preparation for 
his task is such as to make it unlikely he will 
perform it naturally. He goes first, with infinite 
and admirable labor, through all the labyrinth of 
document and detail that lies up and down his 
subject ; collects masses of matter great and small, 
for substance, verification, illustration ; piles his 
notes volimies high ; reads far and wide upon the 
tracks of his matter, and makes page upon page 
of references ; and then, thoroughly stuffed and 
sophisticated, turns back and begins his narrative. 
'T is impossible then that he should begin naturally. 
He sees the end from the beginning, and all the in- 
termediate way from beginning to end; he has made 
up his mind about too many things ; uses his details 
with a too free and famihar mastery, not like one 
who tells a story so much as like one who dissects a 
cadaver. Having swept his details together before- 
hand, like so much scientific material, he discourses 
upon them like a demonstrator, — thinks too little 
in subjection to them. They no longer make a 
fresh impression upon him. They are his tools, 
not his objects of vision. 

It is not by such a process that a narrative is 
made vital and true. It does not do to lose the 
point of view of the first listener to the tale, or to 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER, 181 

rearrange the matter too mucli out of the order of 
nature. You must instruct your reader as the 
events themselves would have instructed him, had 
he been able to note them as they passed. The 
historian must not lose his own fresh view of the 
scene as it passed and changed more and more 
from year to year and from age to age. He must 
keep with the generation of which he writes, not 
be too quick to be wiser than they were or look 
back upon them in his narrative with head over 
shoulder. He must write of them always in the 
atmosphere they themselves breathed, not hastening 
to judge them, but striving only to reahze them at 
every turn of the story, to make their thoughts 
his own, and call their lives back again, rebuilding 
the very stage upon which they played their parts. 
Bring the end of your story to mind while you set 
about telling its beginning, and it seems to have 
no parts : beginning, middle, end, are all as one, — 
are merely like parts of a pattern which you see as 
a single thing stamped upon the stuff under your 
hand. 

Try the method with the history of our own land 
and people. How will you begin ? Will you start 
with a modern map and a careful topographical 
description of the continent? And then, having 
made your nineteenth-century framework for the 



182 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

narrative, will you ask your reader to turn back 
and see the seventeenth century, and those lonely 
ships coming in at the capes of the Chesapeake ? 
He will never see them so long as you compel him 
to stand here at the end of the nineteenth century 
and look at them as if through a long retrospect. 
The attention both of the narrator and of the 
reader, if history is to be seen aright, must look 
forward, not backward. It must see with a con- 
temporaneous eye. Let the historian, if he be 
wise, know no more of the history as he writes 
than might have been known in the age and day 
of which he is writing. A trifle too much know- 
ledge will undo him. It will break the spell for 
his imagination. It will spoil the magic by which 
he may raise again the image of days that are 
gone. He must of course know the large lines of 
his story ; it must lie as a whole in his mind. His 
very art demands that, in order that he may know 
and keep its proportions. But the details, the 
passing incidents of day and year, must come fresh 
into his mind, unreasoned upon as yet, untouched 
by theory, with their first look upon them. It is 
here that original documents and fresh research 
will serve him. He must look far and wide upon 
every detail of the time, see it at first hand, and 
paint as he looks ; selecting, as the artist must, but 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 183 

selecting while the vision is fresh, and not from 
old sketches laid away in his notes, — selecting 
from the life itself. 

Let him remember that his task is radically 
different from the task of the investigator. The 
investigator must display his materials, but the 
historian must convey his impressions. He must 
stand in the presence of life, and reproduce it in 
his narrative ; must recover a past age ; make dead 
generations live again and breathe their own air ; 
show them native and at home upon his page. To 
do this, his own impressions must be as fresh as 
those of an unlearned reader, his own curiosity as 
keen and young at every stage. It may easily be 
so as his reading thickens, and the atmosphere of 
the age comes stealthily into his thought, if only 
he take care to push forward the actual writing of 
his narrative at an equal pace with his reading, 
painting thus always direct from the image itself. 
His knowledge of the great outlines and bulks of 
the picture will be his sufficient guide and restraint 
the while, will give proportion to the individual 
strokes of his work. But it will not check his zest, 
or sophisticate his fresh recovery of the life that is 
in the crowding colors of the canvas. 

A nineteenth-century plan laid like a standard 
and measure upon a seventeenth-century narrative 



184 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 

will infallibly twist it and make it false. Lay a 
modern map before the first settlers at Jamestown 
and Plymouth, and then bid them discover and 
occupy the continent. With how superior a nine- 
teenth-century wonder and pity will you see them 
grope, and stumble, and falter ! How like children 
they will seem to you, and how simple their age, 
and ignorant ! As stalwart men a^ you they were 
in fact ; mayhap wiser and braver too ; as fit to 
occupy a continent as you are. to draw it upon 
paper. If you would know them, go back to their 
age ; breed yourself a pioneer and woodsman ; look 
to find the South Sea up the nearest northwest 
branch of the spreading river at your feet ; discover 
and occupy the wilderness with them ; dream what 
may be beyond the near hills, and long all day to 
see a sail upon the silent sea ; go back to them and 
see them in their habit as they lived. 

The picturesque writers of history have all along 
been right in theory : they have been wrong only 
in practice. It is a picture of the past we want — 
its express image and feature; but we want the 
true picture and not simply the theatrical matter, — 
the manner of Rembrandt rather than of Rubens. 
All life may be pictured, but not all of life is pic- 
turesque. No great, no true historian would put 
false or adventitious colors into his narrative, or 



THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER. 185 

let a glamour rest where in fact it never was. 
The writers who select an incident merely because 
it is striking or dramatic are shallow fellows. 
They see only with the eye's retina, not with that 
deep vision whose images lie where thought and 
reason sit. The real drama of life is disclosed 
only with the whole picture ; and that only the 
deep and fervid student will see, whose mind goes 
daily fresh to the details, whose narrative runs 
always in the authentic colors of nature, whose art 
it is to see, and to paint what he sees. 

It is thus and only thus we shall have the truth 
of the matter : by art, — by the most difficult of all 
arts ; by fresh study and first-hand vision ; at the 
mouths of men who stand in the midst of old let- 
ters and dusty documents and neglected records, 
not like antiquarians, but like those who see a dis- 
tant country and a far-away people before their 
very eyes, as real, as full of hfe and hope and inci- 
dent, as the day in which they themselves live. Let 
us have done with humbug and come to plain 
speech. The historian needs an imagination quite 
as much as he needs scholarship, and consummate 
literary art as much as candor and common honesty. 
Histories are written in order that the bulk of men 
may read and realize ; and it is as bad to bungle 
the telling of the story as to lie, as fatal to lack a 



186 THE TRUTH OF THE MATTEB. 

vocabulary as to lack knowledge. In no case can 
you do more than convey an impression, so various 
and complex is the matter. If you convey a false 
impression, what difference does it make how you 
convey it ? In the whole process there is a nice 
adjustment of means to ends which only the artist 
can manage. There is an art of lying ; — there is 
equally an art, — an infinitely more difficult art, 
— of teUing the truth. 



VII. 

A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

Before a calendar of great Americans can be 
made out, a valid canon of Americanism must first 
be established. Not every great man born and 
bred in America was a great " American." Some 
of the notable men born among us were simply 
great Englishmen ; others had in all the habits of 
their thought and life the strong flavor of a pecul- 
iar region, and were great New Englanders or 
great Southerners ; others, masters in the fields of 
science or of pure thought, showed nothing either 
distinctively national or characteristically provincial, 
and were simply great men ; while a few displayed 
odd cross-strains of blood or breeding. The great 
EngHshmen bred m America, like Hamilton and 
Madison ; the great provincials, like John Adams 
and Calhoun ; the authors of such thought as might 
have been native to any clime, like Asa Gray and 
Emerson ; and the men of mixed breed, like Jeffer- 
son and Benton, — must be excluded from our 
present list. We must pick out men who have 



188 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

created or exemplified a distinctively American 
standard and type of greatness. 

To make such a selection is not to create an arti- 
ficial standard of greatness, or to claim that great- 
ness is in any case hallowed or exalted merely 
because it is American. It is simply to recognize 
a peculiar stamp of character, a special make-up of 
mind and faculties, as the specific product of our 
national life, not displacing or eclipsing talents of 
a different kind, but supplementing them, and so 
adding to the world's variety. / There is an Ameri- 
can type of man, and those who have exhibited this 
type with a certain unmistakable distinction and 
perfection have been great "Americans.", It has 
required the utmost variety of character and energy 
to establish a great nation, with a polity at once 
free and firm, upon this continent, and no sound 
type of manhness could have been dispensed with 
in the effort. We could no more have done with- 
out our great Englishmen, to keep the past stead- 
ily in mind and make every change conservative 
of principle, than we could have done without 
the men whose whole impulse was forward, whose 
whole genius was for origination, natural masters 
of the art of subduing a wilderness. 

Certainly one of the greatest figures in our his- 
tory is the figure of Alexander Hamilton. Ameri- 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 189 

can historians, though compelled always to admire 
him, often in spite of themselves, have been in- 
clined, like the mass of men in his own day, to look 
at him askance. They hint, when they do not 
plainly say, that he was not " American." He re- 
jected, if he did not despise, democratic principles ; 
advocated a government as strong, almost, as a 
monarchy ; and defended the government which 
was actually set up, like the skilled advocate he 
was, only because it was .the strongest that could 
be had under the circumstances. He believed in 
authority, and he had no faith in the aggregate 
wisdom of masses of men. He had, it is true, that 
deep and passionate love of liberty, and that stead- 
fast purpose in the maintenance of it, that mark 
the best Englishmen everywhere ; but his ideas of 
government stuck fast in the old-world politics, and 
his statesmanship was of Europe rather than of 
America. And yet the genius and the steadfast 
spirit of this man were absolutely indispensable to 
us. No one less masterful, no one less resolute 
than he to drill the minority, if necessary, to have 
their way against the majority, could have done the 
great work of organization by which he established 
the national credit, and with the national credit the 
national government itself. A pliant, popular, 
optimistic man would have failed utterly in the 



190 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

task. A great radical mind in his place would 
have brought disaster upon us : only a great con- 
servative genius could have succeeded. It is safe 
to say that, without men of Hamilton's cast of 
mind, building the past into the future with a deep 
passion for order and old wisdom, our national life 
would have miscarried at the very first. This tried 
English talent for conservation gave to our fibre at 
the very outset the stiffness of maturity. 

James Madison, too, we may be said to have in- 
herited. His invaluable gifts of counsel were of 
the sort so happily imparted to us with our Eng- 
lish blood at the first planting of the States which 
formed the Union. A grave and prudent man, 
and yet brave withal when new counsel was to be 
taken, he stands at the beginning of our national 
history, even in his young manhood, as he faced 
and led the constitutional convention, a type of 
the slow and thoughtful English genius for affairs. 
He held old and tested convictions of the uses of 
liberty; he was competently read in the history 
of government ; processes of revolution were in his 
thought no more than processes of adaptation : ex- 
igencies were to be met by modification, not by 
experiment. His reasonable spirit runs through all 
the proceedings of the great convention that gave 
us the Constitution, and that noble instrument 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 191 

seems the product of character like his. For all it 
is so American in its content, it is in its method a 
thoroughly English production, so full is it of old 
principles, so conservative of experience, so care- 
fidly compounded of compromises, of concessions 
made and accepted. Such men are of a stock so 
fine as to need no titles to make it noble, and yet 
so old and so distinguished as actually to bear the 
chief titles of English liberty. Madison came of 
the long line of English constitutional statesmen. 

There is a type of genius which closely ap- 
proaches this in character, but which is, neverthe- 
less, distinctively American. It is to be seen in 
John Marshall and in Daniel Webster. In these 
men a new set of ideas find expression, ideas which 
aU the world has received as American. Webster 
was not an EngHsh but an American constitutional 
statesman. For the English statesman constitu- 
tional issues are issues of policy rather than issues 
of law. He constantly handles questions of change : 
his constitution is always a-making. He must at 
every turn construct, and he is deeined conservative 
if only his rule be consistency and continuity with 
the past. He will search diligently for precedent, 
but he is content if the precedent contain only a 
germ of the policy he proposes. His standards are 
set him, not by law, but by opinion : his constitu- 



192 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

tion is an ideal of cautious and orderly change. 
Its fixed element is the conception of political 
liberty : a conception which, though steeped in 
history, must ever be added to and altered by 
social change. The American constitutional states- 
man, on the contrary, constructs policies like a 
lawyer. The standard with which he must square 
his conduct is set him by a document upon whose 
definite sentences the whole structure of the gov- 
ernment directly rests. That document, moreover, 
is the concrete embodiment of a peculiar theory of 
government. That theory is, that definitive laws, 
selected by a power outside the government, are 
the structural iron of the entire fabric of politics, 
and that nothing which cannot be constructed 
upon this stiff framework is a safe or legitimate 
part of policy. Law is, in his conception, creative 
of states, and they live only by such permissions 
as they can extract from it. The functions of the 
judge and the functions of the man of affairs have, 
therefore, been very closely related in our history, 
and John Marshall, scarcely less than Daniel 
Webster, was a constitutional statesman. With 
aU Madison's conservative temper and wide-eyed 
prudence in counsel, the subject-matter of thought 
for both of these men was not English liberty or 
the experience of men everywhere in self-govern- 



1 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 193 

ment, but the meaning stored up in the explicit 
sentences of a written fundamental law. They 
taught men ' the new — the American — art of 
extracting life out of the letter, not of statutes 
merely (that art was not new), but of statute-built 
institutions and documented governments : the art 
of saturating politics with law without grossly dis- 
coloring law with politics. Other nations have 
had written constitutions, but no other nation has 
ever filled a written constitution with this singularly 
compounded content, of a sound legal conscience 
and a strong national purpose. It would have 
been easy to deal with our Constitution like subtle 
dialecticians ; but Webster and Marshall did much 
more and much better than that. They viewed 
the fimdamental law as a great organic product, a 
vehicle of life as well as a charter of authority ; in 
disclosing its life they did not damage its tissue ; 
and in thus expanding the law without impairing 
its structure or authority they made great contri- 
butions alike to statesmanship and to jurisprudence. 
Our notable literature of decision and commentary 
in the field of constitutional law is America's 
distinctive gift to the history and the science of 
law. John Marshall wrought out much of its sub- 
stance ; Webster diffused its great body of princi- 
ples throughout national policy, mediating between 



194 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

the law and affairs. The figures of the two men 
must hold the eye of the world as the figures of 
two great national representatives, as the figures 
of two great Americans. 

The representative national greatness and func- 
tion of these men appear more clearly still when 
they are contrasted with men like John Adams 
and John C. Calhoun, whose greatness was not 
national. John Adams represented one element of 
our national character, and represented it nobly, 
with a singular force and greatness. He was an 
eminent Puritan statesman, and the Puritan ingre- 
dient has colored all our national life. We have 
got strength and persistency and some part of our 
steady moral purpose from it. But in the quick 
growth and exuberant expansion of the nation it 
has been only one element among many. The 
Puritan blood has mixed with many another strain. 
The stiff Puritan character has been mellowed by 
many a transfusion of gentler and more hopeful 
elements. So soon as the Adams fashion of man 
became more narrow, intense, acidulous, intractable, 
according to the tendencies of its nature, in the 
person of John Quincy Adams, it lost the sym- 
pathy, lost even the tolerance, of the country, and 
the national choice took its reckless leap from a 
Puritan President to Andrew Jackson, a man cast 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 195 

in the rough original pattern of American life at 
the heart of the continent. John Adams had not 
himself been a very acceptable President. He had 
none of the national optimism, and could not un- 
derstand those who did have it. He had none of 
the characteristic adaptability of the delocalized 
American, and was just a bit ridiculous in his stiff- 
ness at the Court of St. James, for all he was so 
honorable and so imposing. His t3rpe, — be it said 
without disrespect, — was provincial. Unmistaka- 
bly a great man, his greatness was of the common- 
wealth, not of the empire. 

Calhoun, too, was a great provincial. Although 
a giant, he had no heart to use his great strength 
for national purposes. In his youth, it is true, he 
did catch some of the generous ardor for national 
enterprise which filled the air in his day ; and all 
his life through, with a truly pathetic earnestness, 
he retained his affection for his first ideal. But 
when the rights and interests of his section were 
made to appear incompatible with a liberal and 
boldly constructive interpretation of the Constitu- 
tion, he fell out of national counsels and devoted 
all the strength of his extraordinary mind to hold- 
ing the nation's thought and power back within 
the strait limits of a literal construction of the law. 
In powers of reasoning his mind deserves to rank 



196 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

with Webster's and Marshall's : he handled ques- 
tions of law like a master, as they did. He had, 
moreover, a keen insight into the essential princi- 
ples and character of liberty. His thought moved 
eloquently along some of the oldest and safest lines 
of English thought in the field of government. 
He made substantive contributions to the perma^ 
nent philosophy of politics. His reasoning has 
been discredited, not so much because it was not 
theoretically sound within its limits, as because its 
practical outcome was a negation which embar- 
rassed the whole movement of national affairs. 
He would have held the nation still, in an old 
equipoise, at one time normal enough, but impossi- 
ble to maintain. Webster and Marshall gave leave 
to the energy of change inherent in all the na- 
tional life, making law a rule, but not an interdict ; 
a living guide, but not a blind and rigid discipline. 
Calhoun sought to Bx law as a barrier across the 
path of policy, commanding the life of the nation 
to stand still. The strength displayed in the effort, 
the intellectual power and address, abundantly en- 
title him to be called great ; but his purpose was 
not national. It regarded only a section of the 
country, and marked him, — again be it said with 
all respect, — a great provincial. 

Jefferson was not a thorough American because 



1 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 197 

of the strain of Frencli philosophy that permeated 
and weakened all his thought. Benton was alto- 
gether American so far as the natural strain of his 
blood was concerned, but he had encumbered his 
natural parts and inclinations with a mass of undi- 
gested and shapeless learning. Bred in the West, 
where everything was new, he had filled his head 
with the thought of books (evidently very poor 
books) which exhibited the ideals of communities 
in which everything was old. He thought of the 
Roman Senate when he sat in the Senate of the 
United States. He paraded classical figures when- 
ever he spoke, upon a stage where both their 
costume and their action seemed grotesque. A 
pedantic frontiersman, he was a living and a 
pompous antinomy. Meant by nature to be an 
American, he spoiled the plan by applying a most 
unsuitable gloss of shallow and irrelevant learning. 
Jefferson was of course an almost immeasurably 
greater man than Benton, but he was un-American 
in somewhat the same way. He brought a foreign 
product of thought to a market where no natural 
or wholesome demand for it could exist. There 
were not two incompatible parts in him, as in Ben- 
ton's case : he was a philosophical radical by nature 
as well as by acquirement ; his reading and his 
temperament went suitably together. The man is 



198 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

homogeneous throughout. The American shows in 
him very plainly, too, notwithstanding the strong 
and inherent dash of what was foreign in his 
make-up. He was a natural leader and manager 
of men, not because he was imperative or master- 
ful, but because of a native shrewdness, tact, and 
sagacity, an inborn art and aptness for combination, 
such as no Frenchman ever displayed in the man-- 
agement of common men. Jefferson had just a 
touch of rusticity about him, besides ; and it was 
not pretense on his part or merely a love of power 
that made him democratic. His indiscriminate 
hospitality, his almost passionate love for the sim- 
ple equality of country life, his steady devotion to 
what he deemed to be the cause of the people, all 
mark him a genuine democrat, a nature native to 
America. It is his speculative philosophy that is 
exotic, and that runs like a false and artificial note 
through all his thought. It was un-American in 
being abstract, sentimental, rationalistic, rather 
than practical. That he held it sincerely need not 
be doubted ; but the more sincerely he accepted it 
so much the more thorouglily was he un-American. 
His writings lack hard and practical sense. \ Lib- 
erty, among us, is not a sentiment, but a product 
of experience; its derivation is not rationalistic, 
but practical. It is a hard-headed spirit of inde- 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 199 

pendence, not the conclusion of a syllogism. The 
very aerated quality of Jefferson's principles gives 
them an air of insincerity, which attaches to them 
rather because they do not suit the climate of the 
country and the practical aspect of affairs than be- 
cause they do not suit the character of Jefferson's 
mind and the atmosphere of abstract philosophy. 
It is because both they and the philosophical 
system of which they form a part do seem suitable 
to his mind and character, that we must pronounce 
him, though a great man, not a great American. 

It is by the frank consideration of such concrete 
cases that we may construct, both negatively and 
affirmatively, our canons of Americanism. ^The 
American spirit is something more than the old, 
the immemorial Saxon spirit of liberty from which 
it sprung. It has been bred by the conditions 
attending the great task which we have all the 
century been carrying forward : the task, at once 
material and ideal, of subduing a wilderness and 
covering all the wide stretches of a vast continent 
with a single free and stable polity. It is, accord- 
ingly, above all things, a hopeful and confident 
spirit. It is progressive, optimistically progressive, 
and ambitious of objects of national scope and 
advantage. It is unpedantic, unprovincial, unspec- 
ulative, unf astidious ; regardful of law, but as using 



200 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

it, not as being used by it or dominated by any 
formalism whatever ; in a sense unrefined, because 
full of rude force ; but prompted by large and gen- 
erous motives, and often as tolerant as it is reso- 
lute. No one man, unless it be Lincoln, has ever 
proved big or various enough to embody this active 
and full-hearted spirit in all its qualities ; and the 
men who have been too narrow or too speculative 
or too pedantic to represent it have, nevertheless, 
added to the strong and stirring variety of our 
national life, making it fuller and richer in motive 
and energy ; but its several aspects are none the 
less noteworthy as they separately appear in differ- 
ent men. 

One of the first men to exhibit this American 
spirit with an unmistakable touch of greatness and 
distinction was Benjamin Franklin. It was char- 
acteristic of America that this self-made man should 
become a philosopher, a founder of philosophical 
societies, an authoritative man of science ; that his 
philosophy of life should be so homely and so prac- 
tical in its maxims, and uttered with so shrewd a 
wit ; that one region should be his birthplace and 
another his home; that he should favor effective 
political union among the colonies from the first, 
and should play a sage and active part in the 
establishment of national independence and the 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 201 

planning of a national organization ; and that he 
should represent his countrymen in diplomacy 
abroad. They could have had no spokesman who 
represented more sides of their character. Franklin 
was a sort of multiple American. He was versatile 
without lacking solidity ; he was a practical states- 
man without ceasing to be a sagacious philosopher. 
He came of the people, and was democratic ; but 
he had raised himself out of the general mass of 
unnamed men, and so stood for the democratic law, 
not of equality, but of self-selection in endeavor. 
One can feel sure that Franklin would have suc- 
ceeded in any part of the national life that it might 
have fallen to his lot to take part in. He will 
stand the final and characteristic test of American- 
ism : he would unquestionably have made a success- 
ful frontiersman, capable at once of wielding the 
axe and of administering justice from the fallen 
trunk./ 

Washington hardly seems an American, as most 
of his biographers depict him. He is too colorless, 
too cold, too prudent. He seems more like a wise 
and dispassionate Mr. Alworthy, advising a nation 
as he would a parish, than like a man building 
states^ and marshaling a nation in a wilderness. 
But' the real Washington was as thoroughly an 
American as Jackson or Lincoln. What we take 



202 A CALENBAB OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

for lack of passion in Mm was but the reserve and 
self-mastery natural to a man of his class and 
breeding in Virginia. He was no parlor politician, 
either. He had seen the frontier, and far beyond 
it where the French forts lay. He knew the rough 
life of the country as few other men could. His 
thoughts did not live at Mount Yernon. He knew 
difficulty as intimately and faced it always with as 
quiet a mastery as William the Silent. This calm, 
straightforward, high-spirited man, making charts 
of the western country, noting the natural land 
and water routes into the heart of the continent, 
marking how the French power lay, conceiving the 
policy which should dispossess it, and the engineer- 
ing achievements which should make the utmost 
resources of the land our own ; counseling Brad- 
dock how to enter the forest, but not deserting him 
because he would not take advice ; planning step 
by step, by patient correspondence with influential 
men everywhere, the meetings, conferences, com- 
mon resolves which were finally to bring the great 
constitutional convention together ; planning, too, 
always for the country as well as for Virginia ; and 
presiding at last over the establishment and organ- 
ization of the government of the Union : he certainly 
— the most suitable instrument of the national life 
at every moment of crisis — is a great American. 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 203 

Those noble words which he uttered amidst the 
first doubtings of the constitutional convention 
might serve as a motto for the best efforts of lib- 
erty wherever free men strive : " Let us raise a 
standard to which the wise and honest can repair ; 
the event is in the hand of God." 

In Henry Clay we have an American of a most 
authentic pattern. There was no man of his 
generation who represented more of America than 
he did. The singular, almost irresistible attraction 
he had for men of every class and every tempera- 
ment came, not from the arts of the politician, but 
from the instant sympathy established between him 
and every fellow-countryman of his. He does not 
seem to have exercised the same fascination upon 
foreigners. They felt toward him as some New 
Englanders did : he seemed to them plausible 
merely, too indiscriminately open and cordial to be 
sincere, — a bit of a charlatan. No man who really 
takes the trouble to understand Henry Clay, or 
who has quick enough parts to sympathize with 
him, can deem him false. It is the odd combina- 
tion of two different elements in him that makes 
him seem irregular and inconstant. His nature 
was of the West, blown through with quick winds 
of ardor and aggression, a bit reckless and defiant ; 
but his art was of the East, ready with soft and 



204 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

placating phrases, reminiscent of old and reverenced 
ideals, thoughtful of compromise and accommoda- 
tion. He had all the address of the trained and 
sophisticated politician, bred in an old and sensitive 
society ; but his purposes ran free of cautious re- 
straints, and his real ideals were those of the some- 
what bumptious Americanism which was pushing 
the frontier forward in the West, which believed 
itself capable of doing anjrthing it might put its 
hand to, despised conventional restraints, and 
followed a vague but resplendent " manifest des- 
tiny " with lusty hurrahs. His purposes were sin- 
cere, even if often crude and uninstructed ; it was 
only because the subtle arts of politics seemed in- 
consistent with*^the direct dash and bold spirit of 
the man that they sat upon him like an insincer- 
ity. He thoroughly, and by mere unconscious sym- 
pathy, represented the double America of his day, 
made up of a West which hurried and gave bold 
strokes, and of an East which held back, fearing 
the pace, thoughtful and mindful of the instruc- 
tive past. The one part had to be served without 
offending the other: and that was Clay's medi- 
atorial function. 

Andrew Jackson was altogether of the West. 
Of his sincerity nobody has ever had any real 
doubt ; and his Americanism is now at any rate 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 205 

equally unimpeachable. He was Uke Clay with 
the social imagination of the orator and the art 
and sophistication of the Eastern politician left out. 
He came into our national poHtics like a cyclone 
from off the Western prairies. Americans of the 
present day perceptibly shudder at the very recol- 
lection of Jackson. He seems to them a great 
Vandal, playing fast and loose alike with institu- 
tions and with tested and estabhshed policy, de- 
bauching politics like a modern spoilsman. But 
whether we would accept him as a type of ourselves 
or not, the men of his own day accepted him with 
enthusiasm. He did not need to be explained to 
them. They crowded to his standard hke men 
free at last, after long and tedious restraint, to 
make their own choice, follow their own man. 
There can be no mistaking the spontaneity of the 
thoroughgoing support he received. His was the 
new type of energy and self-confidence bred by 
life outside the States that had been colonies. It 
was a terrible energy, threatening sheer destruction 
to many a carefully wrought arrangement handed 
on to us from the past ; it was a perilous self-con- 
fidence, founded in sheer strength rather than in 
wisdom. The government did not pass through 
the throes of that signal awakening of the new 
national spirit without serious rack and damage. 



206 A CALENDAR OF GBEAT AMERICANS. 

But it was no disease. It was only an incautious, 
abounding, madcap strength which proved so dan- 
gerous in its readiness for every rash endeavor. It 
was necessary that the West should be let into the 
play : it was even necessary that she should assert 
her right to the leading role. It was done with- 
out good taste, but that does not condemn it. We 
have no doubt refined and schooled the hoyden 
influences of that crude time, and they are vastly 
safer now than then, when they first came bound- 
ing in ; but they mightily stirred and enriched our 
blood from the first. Now that we have thoroughly 
suffered this Jackson change and it is over, we are 
ready to recognize it as quite as radically American 
as anything in all our history. 

Lincoln, nevertheless, rather than Jackson, was 
the supreme American of our history. In Clay, 
East and West were mixed without being fused or 
harmonized : he seems like two men. In Jackson 
there was not even a mixture ; he was all of a piece, 
and altogether unacceptable to some parts of the 
country, — a frontier statesman. But in Lincoln 
the elements were combined and harmonized. The 
most singular thing about the wonderful career of 
the man is the way in which he steadily grew into 
a national stature. He began an amorphous, un- 
licked cub, bred in the rudest of human lairs; 



A CALENDAR OF GEE AT AMERICANS. 207 

but, as he grew, everything formed, informed, 
transformed him. The process was slow but un- 
broken. He was not fit to be President until he 
actually became President. He was fit then 
because, learning everything as he went, he had 
found out how much there was to learn, and had 
still an infinite capacity for learning. The quiet 
voices of sentiment and murmurs of resolution 
that went whispering through the land, his ear 
always caught, when others could hear nothing but 
their own words. He never ceased to be a common 
man : that was his source of strength. But he 
was a common man with genius, a genius for things 
American, for insight into the Common thought, 
for mastery of the fundamental things of politics 
that inhere in human nature and cast hardly more 
than their shadows on constitutions ; for the practi- 
cal niceties of affairs ; for judging men and assessing 
arguments. Jackson had no social imagination : 
no unfamiliar community made any impression on 
him. His whole fibre stiffened young, and nothing 
afterward could modify or even deeply affect it. 
But Lincoln was always a-making ; he would have 
died unfinished if the terrible storms of the war 
had not stung him to learn in those four years 
what no other twenty could have taught him. 
And, as he stands there in his complete manhood, 



208 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

at the most perilous helm in Christendom, what a 
marvelous composite figure he is ! The whole 
country is summed up in him : the rude Western 
strength, tempered with shrewdness and a broad 
and humane wit ; the Eastern conservatism, regard- 
ful of law and devoted to fixed standards of duty. 
He even understood the South, as no other Northern 
man of his generation did. He respected, because 
he comprehended, though he could not hold, its 
view of the Constitution ; he appreciated the in- 
exorable compulsions of its past in respect of 
slavery ; he would have secured it once more, and 
speedily if possible, in its right to self-government, 
when the fight was fought out. To the Eastern 
politicians he seemed like an accident ; but to his- 
tory he must seem like a providence. 

Grant was Lincoln's suitable instrument, a great 
American general, the appropriate product of West 
Point. A Western man, he had no thought of 
commonwealths politically separate, and was in- 
stinctively for the Union ; a man of the common 
people, he deemed himself always an instrument, 
never a master, and did his work, though ruth- 
lessly, without malice ; a sturdy, hard-willed, taci- 
turn man, a sort of Lincoln 4;he Silent in thought 
and spirit. He does not appeal to the imagination 
very deeply ; there is a sort of common greatness 



A CALENDAR OF GBEAT AMERICANS. 209 

about him, great gifts combined singularly with a 
great mediocrity ; but such peculiarities seem to 
make him all the more American, — national in 
spirit, thoroughgoing in method, masterful in 
purpose. 

And yet it is no contradiction to say that Robert 
E. Lee also was a great American. He fought on 
the opposite side, but he fought in the same spirit, 
and for a principle which is in a sense scarcely less 
American than the principle of Union. He repre- 
sented the idea of the inherent — the essential — 
separateness of self-government. This was not 
the principle of secession : that principle involved 
the separate right of the several self-governing 
imits of the federal system to judge of national 
questions independently, and as a check upon the 
federal government, — to adjudge the very objects 
of the Union. Lee did not believe in secession, 
but he did believe in the local rootage of all gov- 
ernment. This is at the bottom, no doubt, an 
English idea ; but it has had a characteristic Amer- 
ican development. It is the reverse side of the 
shield which bears upon its obverse the devices of 
the Union, a side too much overlooked and ob- 
scured since the war. It conceives the individual 
State a community united by the most intimate 
associations, the first home and foster-mother of 



210 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

every man born into the citizenship of the nation. 
Lee considered himself a member of one of these 
great families ; he could not conceive of the nation 
apart from the State : above all, he could not live 
in the nation divorced from his neighbors. His 
own community should decide his pohtical destiny 
and duty. 

This was also the spirit of Patrick Henry and of 
Sam Houston, — men much alike in the cardinal 
principle of their natures. Patrick Henry resisted 
the formation of the Union only because he feared 
to disturb the local rootage of self-government, to dis- 
perse power so widely that neighbors could not con- 
trol it. It was not a disloyal or a separatist spirit, 
but only a jealous spirit of liberty. Sam Houston, 
too, deemed the character a community should give 
itself so great a matter that the community, once 
made, ought itseK to judge of the national associa- 
tions most conducive to its liberty and progress. 
Without liberty of this intensive character there 
could have been no ^dtal national liberty ; and Sam 
Houston, Patrick Henry, and Robert E. Lee are 
none the less great Americans because they repre- 
sented only one cardinal principle of the national 
life. Self-government has its intrinsic antinomies 
as well as its harmonies. >^ 

Among men of letters Lowell is doubtless most 



A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 211 

typically American, thougli Curtis must find an 
eligible place in the list. Lowell was self-con- 
scious, thougli the truest greatness is not ; he was 
a trifle too " smart," besides, and there is no 
" smartness " in great literature. But both the 
self-consciousness and the smartness must be ad- 
mitted to be American ; and Lowell was so versa- 
tile, so urbane, of so large a spirit, and so admirable 
in the scope of his sympathies, that he must cer- 
tainly go on the calendar. 

There need be no fear that we shall be obliged to 
stop with Lowell in literature, or with any of the 
men who have been named in the field of achieve- 
ment. We shall not in the future have to take 
one type of Americanism at a time. The frontier 
is gone : it has reached the Pacific. The country 
grows rapidly homogeneous. With the same pace 
it grows various, and multiform in all its life. 
The man of the simple or local type cannot any 
longer deal in the great manner with any national 
problem. The great men of our future must be of 
the composite type of greatness : sound-hearted, 
hopeful, confident of the validity of liberty, tena- 
cious of the deeper principles of American institu- 
tions, but with the old rashness schooled and 
sobered, and instinct tempered by instruction. 
They must be wise with an adult, not with an 



212 A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS. 

adolescent wisdom. Some day we shall be of one 
mind, our ideals fixed, our purposes harmonized, 
our nationality complete and consentaneous : then 
will come our great literature and our greatest 
men. 



VIII. 

THE COUESE OF AMERICAN HISTORY.^ 

In the field of history, learning should be deemed 
to stand among the people and in the midst of life. 
Its function there is not one of pride merely ; to 
make complaisant record of deeds honorably done 
and plans nobly executed in the past. It has also a 
function of guidance : to build high places whereon 
to plant the clear and flaming lights of experience, 
that they may shine ahke upon the roads already 
traveled and upon the paths not yet attempted. 
The historian is also a sort of prophet. Our 
memories direct us. They give us knowledge of 
our character, alike in its strength and in its weak- 
ness : and it is so we get our standards for endeavor, 
— our warnings and our gleams of hope. It is 
thus we learn what manner of nation we are of, 
and divine what manner of people we should be. 

And this is not in national records merely. 

Local history is the ultimate substance of national 

history. There could be no epics were pastorals 

1 An address delivered before the New Jersey Historical Society. 



214 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

not also true, — no patriotism, were there no homes, 
no neighbors, no quiet round of civic duty ; and I, 
for my part, do not wonder that scholarly men 
have been found not a few who, though they might 
have shone upon a larger field, where all eyes 
would have seen them win their fame, yet chose 
to pore all their lives long upon the blurred and 
scattered records of a country-side, where there was 
nothing but an old church or an ancient village. 
The history of a nation is only the history of its 
villages written large. I only marvel that these 
local historians have not seen more in the stories 
they have sought to tell. Surely here, in these old 
hamlets that antedate the cities, in these little 
communities that stand apart and yet give their 
young life to the nation, is to be found the very 
authentic stuff of romance for the mere looking. 
There is love and courtship and eager life and 
high devotion up and down all the lines of every 
genealogy. What strength, too, and bold endeavor 
in the cutting down of forests to make the clear- 
ings ; what breath of hope and discovery in scaling 
for the first time the nearest mountains ; what 
longings ended or begun upon the coming in of 
ships into the harbor ; what pride of earth in the 
rivalries of the village ; what thoughts of heaven 
in the quiet of the rural church ! What forces of 



THE COUBSE OF AMEBIC AN HISTORY. 215 

slow and steadfast endeavor there were in the 
building of a great city upon the foundations of a 
hamlet : and how the plot broadens and thickens 
and grows dramatic as communities widen into 
states I Here, surely, sunk deep in the very fibre 
of the stuff, are the colors of the great story of 
men, — the lively touches of reality and the strik- 
ing images of Hfe. 

It must be admitted, I know, that local history 
can be made deadly dull in the telling. The men 
who reconstruct it seem usually to build with kiln- 
dried stuff, — as if with a purpose it should last. 
But that is not the fault of the subject. National 
history may be written almost as ill, if due pains 
be taken to dry it out. It is d. trifle more difficult : 
because merely to speak of national affairs is to 
give hint of great forces and of movements blown 
upon by all the airs of the wide continent. The 
mere largeness of the scale lends to the narrative 
a certain dignity and spirit. But some men will 
manage to be dull though they shoidd speak of 
creation. In writing of local history the thing 
is fatally easy. For there is some neighborhood 
history that lacks any large significance, which is 
without horizon or outlook. There are details in 
the history of every community which it concerns 
no man to know again when once they are past 



216 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

and decently buried in the records : and these are 
the very details, no doubt, which it is easiest to 
find upon a casual search. It is easier to make 
out a list of county clerks than to extract the social 
history of the county from the records they have 
kept, — though it is not so important : and it is 
easier to make a catalogue of anything than to say 
what of life and purpose the catalogue stands for. 
This is called collecting facts " for the sake of the 
facts themselves ; " but if I wished to do aught for 
the sake of the facts themselves I think I should 
serve them better by giving their true biographies 
than by merely displaying their faces. 

The right and vital sort of local history is the 
sort which may be written with lifted eyes, — the 
sort which has an horizon and an outlook upon 
the world. Sometimes it may happen, indeed, 
that ^the annals of a neighborhood disclose some 
singular adventure which had its beginning and its 
ending there : some unwonted bit of fortune which 
stands unique and lonely amidst the myriad trans- 
actions of the world of affairs, and deserves to be 
told singly and for its own sake. But usually the 
significance of local history is, that it is part of a 
greater whole. A spot of local history is like an 
inn upon a highway : it is a stage upon a far 
journey: it is a place the national history has 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 217 

passed through. There mankind has stopped and 
lodged by the way. Local history is thus less than 
national history only as the part is less than the 
whole. The whole could not dispense with the 
part, would not exist without it, could not be 
understood unless the part also were understood. 
Local history is subordinate to national only in the 
sense in which each leaf of a book is subordinate 
to the volume itseK. Upon no single page will the 
whole theme of the book be found ; but each page 
holds a part of the theme. Even were the history 
of each locality exactly like the history of every 
other (which it cannot be), it would deserve to be 
written, — if only to corroborate the history of the 
rest, and verify it as an authentic part of the 
record of the race and nation. The common ele- 
ments of a nation's life are the great elements of 
its life, the warp and woof of the fabric. They 
cannot be too much or too substantially verified and 
explicated. It is so that history is made solid 
and fit for use and wear. 

Our national history, of course, has its own great 
and spreading pattern, which can be seen in its 
full form and completeness only when the stuff of 
our national life is laid before us in broad surfaces 
and upon an ample scale. But the detail of the 
pattern, the individual threads of the great fabric, 



218 THE COUBSE OF AMEBICAN HISTORY. 

are to be found only in local history. There is all 
the intricate weaving, all the delicate shading, all 
the nice refinement of the pattern, — gold thread 
mixed with fustian, fine thread laid upon coarse, 
shade combined with shade. Assuredly it is this 
that gives to local history its life and importance. 
The idea, moreover, furnishes a nice criterion of 
interest. The life of some localities is, obviously, 
more completely and intimately a part of the 
national pattern than the life of other localities, 
which are more separate and, as it were, put upon 
the border of the fabric. To come at once and 
very candidly to examples, the local history of the 
Middle States, — New York, New Jersey, and 
Pennsylvania, — is much more structurally a part 
of the characteristic life of the nation as a whole 
than is the history of the New England communities 
or of the several States and regions of the South. 
I know that such a heresy will sound very rank in 
the ears of some : for I am speaking against ac- 
cepted doctrine. But acceptance, be it never so 
general, does not make a doctrine true. 

Our national history has been written for the 
most part by New England men. All honor to 
them ! Their scholarship and their characters alike 
have given them an honorable enrollment amongst 
the great names of our literary history; and no 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 219 

just man would say aught to detract, were it never 
so little, from their well-earned fame. They have 
written our history, nevertheless, from but a single 
point of view. From where they sit, the whole of 
the great development looks like an Expansion of 
New England. Other elements but play along the 
sides of the great process by which the Puritan has 
worked out the development of nation and polity. 
It is he who has gone out and possessed the land : 
the man of destiny, the type and impersonation of 
a chosen people. To the Southern writer, too, the 
story looks much the same, if it be but followed to 
its culmination, — to its final storm and stress and 
tragedy in the great war. It is the history of the 
Suppression of the South. Spite of all her splen- 
did contributions to the steadfast accomplishment 
of the great task of building the nation ; spite of 
the long leadership of her statesmen in the national 
counsels ; spite of her joint achievements in the 
conquest and occupation of the West, the South 
was at last turned upon on every hand, rebuked, 
proscribed, defeated. The history of the United 
States, we have learned, was, from the settlement 
at Jamestown to the surrender at Appomattox, a 
long-drawn contest for mastery between New Eng- 
land and the South, — and the end of the contest 
we know. All along the parallels of latitude ran 



220 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

the rivalry, in those heroical days of toil and ad- 
venture during which population crossed the conti- 
nent, like an army advancing its encampments. 
Up and down the great river of the continent, too, 
and beyond, up the slow incline of the vast steppes 
that lift themselves toward the crowning towers of 
the Rockies, — beyond that, again, in the gold- 
fields and upon the green plains of California, the 
race for ascendency struggled on, — till at length 
there was a final coming face to face, and the mas- 
terful folk who had come from the loins of New 
England won their consummate victory. 

It is a very dramatic form for the story. One 
almost wishes it were true. How fine a unity it 
would give our epic ! But perhaps, after all, the 
real truth is more interesting. The Hfe of the 
nation cannot be reduced to these so simple terms. 
These two great forces, of the North and of the 
South, unquestionably existed, — were unquestion- 
ably projected in their operation out upon the 
great plane of the continent, there to combine or 
repel, as circumstances might determine. But the 
people that went out from the North were not an 
unmixed people ; they came from the great Middle 
States as well as from New England. Their 
transplantation into the West was no more a 
reproduction of New England or New York or 



THE COUBSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 221 

Pennsylvania or New Jersey than Massachusetts 
was a reproduction of old England, or New Nether- 
land a reproduction of Holland. The Southern 
people, too, whom they met by the western rivers 
and upon the open prairies, were transformed, as 
they themselves were, by the rough fortunes of the 
frontier. A mixture of peoples, a modification of 
mind and habit, a new round of experiment and 
adjustment amidst the novel life of the baked and 
untilled plain, and the far valleys with the virgin 
forests still thick upon them : a new temper, a new 
spirit of adventure, a new impatience of restraint, 
a new license of life, — these are the characteristic 
notes and measures of the time when the nation 
spread itself at large upon the continent, and was 
transformed from a group of colonies into a family 
of States. 

The passes of these eastern mountains were the 
arteries of the nation's hfe. The real breath of 
our growth and manhood came into our nostrils 
when first, like Governor Spotswood and that gal- 
lant company of Virginian gentlemen that rode 
with him in the far year 1716, the Knights of the 
Order of the Golden Horseshoe, our pioneers stood 
upon the ridges of the eastern hills and looked 
down upon those reaches of the continent where 
lay the untrodden paths of the westward migration. 



222 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

There, upon the courses of the distant rivers that 
gleamed before them in the sun, down the farther 
slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the broad fields 
that lay upon the fertile banks of the " Father of 
Waters," up the long tilt of the continent to the 
vast hills that looked out upon the Pacific — there 
were the regions in which, joining with people 
from every race and clime under the sun, they 
were to make the great compounded nation whose 
liberty and mighty works of peace were to cause 
all the world to stand at gaze. Thither were to 
come Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Celts, Dutch, 
Slavs, — men of the Latin races and of the races 
of the Orient, as well as men, a great host, of the 
first stock of the settlements : English, Scots, Scots- 
Irish, — like New England men, but touched with 
the salt of humor, hard, and yet neighborly too. 
For this great process of growth by grafting, of 
modification no less than of expansion, the colonies, 
— the original thirteen States, — were only pre- 
liminary studies and first experiments. But the 
experiments that most resembled the great methods 
by which we peopled the continent from side to 
side and knit a single polity across all its length 
and breadth, were surely the experiments made 
from the very first in the Middle States of our 
Atlantic seaboard. 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 223 

Here from the first were mixture of population, 
variety of element, combination of type, as if of 
the nation itself in small. Here was never a 
simple body, a people of but a single blood and 
extraction, a polity and a practice brought straight 
from one motherland. The life of these States was 
from the beginning like the life of the country: 
they have always shown the national pattern. In 
New England and the South it was very different. 
There some of the great elements of the national 
life were long in preparation : but separately and 
with an individual distinction ; without mixture, — 
for long almost without movement. That the ele- 
ments thus separately prepared were of the greatest 
importance, and run everywhere like chief threads 
of the pattern through all our subsequent life, who 
can doubt? They give color and tone to every 
part of the figure. The very fact that they are so 
distinct and separately evident throughout, the 
very emphasis of individuality they carry with 
them, but proves their distinct origin. The other 
elements of our life, various though they be, and 
of the very fibre, giving toughness and consistency 
to the fabric, are merged in its texture, united, 
confused, almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly 
are they mixed, intertwined, interwoven, like the 
essential strands of the stuff itself : but these of 



224 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

the Puritan and the Southerner, though they run 
everywhere with the rest and seem upon a superfi- 
cial view themselves the body of the cloth, in fact 
modify rather than make it. 

What in fact has been the course of American 
history ? How is it to be distinguished from Eu- 
ropean history ? What features has it of its own, 
which give it its distinctive plan and movement ? 
We have suffered, it is to be feared, a very serious 
limitation of view imtil recent years by having all 
our history written in the East. It has smacked 
strongly of a local flavor. It has concerned itself 
too exclusively with the origins and Old- World 
derivations of our story. Our historians have 
made their march from the sea with their heads 
over shoulder, their gaze always backward upon the 
landing-places and homes of the first settlers. In 
spite of the steady immigration, with its persistent 
tide of foreign blood, they have chosen to speak 
often and to think always of our people as sprung 
after all from a common stock, bearing a family 
likeness in every branch, and following all the while 
old, familiar, family ways. The view is the more 
misleading because it is so large a part of the truth 
without being all of it. The common British 
stock did first make the country, and has always 
set the pace. There were common institutions up 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 225 

and down the coast ; and these had formed and 
hardened for a persistent growth before the great 
westward migration began which was to re-shape 
and modify every element of our hf e. The national 
government itself was set up and made strong by 
success while yet we lingered for the most part 
upon the eastern coast and feared a too distant 
frontier. 

But, the beginnings once safely made, change 
set in apace. Not only so : there had been slow 
change from the first. We have no frontier now, 
we are told, — except a broken fragment, it may 
be, here and there in some barren corner of the 
western lands, where some inhospitable mountain 
still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking 
to break the baked surface of the plains and occupy 
them in the very teeth of hostile nature. But at 
first it was all frontier, — a mere strip of settle- 
ments stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of 
the wilds : an untouched continent in front of 
them, and behind them an unfrequented sea that 
almost never showed so much as the momentary 
gleam of a sail. Every step in the slow process of 
settlement was but a step of the same kind as the 
first, an advance to a new frontier Hke the old. 
For long we lacked, it is true, that new breed of 
frontiersmen born in after years beyond the moun- 



226 THE COURSE OF AMEBIC AN HISTORY. 

tains. Those first frontiersmen had still a touch of 
the timidity of the Old World in their blood : they 
lacked the frontier heart. They were " Pilgrims " 
in very fact, — exiled, not at home. Fine courage 
they had : and a steadfastness in their bold design 
which it does a faint-hearted age good to look back 
upon. There was no thought of drawing back. 
Steadily, almost calmly, they extended their seats. 
They built homes, and deemed it certain their chil- 
dren would live there after them. But they did not 
love the rough, uneasy life for its own sake. How 
long did they keep, if they could, within sight of 
the sea ! The wilderness was their refuge ; but 
how long before it became their joy and hope ! 
Here was their destiny cast ; but their hearts lin- 
gered and held back. It was only as generations 
passed and the work widened about them that their 
thought also changed, and a new thrill sped along 
their blood. Their life had been new and strange 
from their first landing in the wilderness. Their 
houses, their food, their clothing, their neighbor- 
hood dealings were all such as only the frontier 
brings. Insensibly they were themselves changed. 
The strange life became familiar ; their adjustment 
to it was at length unconscious and without effort ; 
they had no plans which were not inseparably a part 
and a product of it. But, until they had turned 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 227 

their backs once for all upon the sea ; until they 
saw their western borders cleared of the French ; 
until the mountain passes had grown familiar, and 
the lands beyond the central and constant theme 
of their hope, the goal and dream of their young 
men, they did not become an American people. 

When they did, the great determining movement 
of our history began. The very visages of the 
people changed. That alert movement of the eye, 
that openness to every thought of enterprise or ad- 
venture, that nomadic habit which knows no fixed 
home and has plans ready to be carried any whither, 
— all the marks ^ of the authentic tj^pe of the 
" American " as we know him came into our life. 
The crack of the whip and the song of the team- 
ster, the heaving chorus of boatmen poling their 
heavy rafts upon the rivers, the laughter of the 
camp, the sound of bodies of men in the still forests, 
became the characteristic notes in our air. A 
roughened race, embrowned in the sun, hardened 
in manner by a coarse life of change and danger, 
loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle, 
living to begin something new every day, striking 
with the broad and open hand, delicate in nothing 
but the touch of the trigger, leaving cities in its 
track as if by accident rather than design, settling 
again to the steady ways of a fixed life only when 



228 THE COUBSE OF AMEBICAN HISTORY. 

it must : such was the American people whose 
achievement it was to be to take possession of their 
continent from end to end ere their national govern- 
ment was a single century old. The picture is a 
very singular one ! Settled life and wild side by 
side : civilization frayed at the edges, — taken for- 
ward in rough and ready fashion, with a song and 
a swagger, — not by statesmen, but by woodsmen 
and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles in their 
hands, clad in buckskin, like huntsmen. 

It has been said that we have here repeated 
some of the first processes of history ; that the 
life and methods of our frontiersmen take us back 
to the fortimes and hopes of the men who crossed 
Europe when her forests, too, were still thick upon 
her. But the difference is really very fundamental, 
and much more worthy of remark than the like- 
ness. Those shadowy masses of men whom we see 
moving upon the face of the earth in the far- 
away, questionable days when states were forming : 
even those stalwart figures we see so well as they 
emerge from the deep forests of Germany, to dis- 
place the Roman in all his western provinces and 
set up the states we know and marvel upon at this 
day, show us men working their new work at their 
own level. They do not turn back a long cycle of 
years from the old and settled states, the ordered 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 229 

cities, the tilled fields, and the elaborated govern- 
ments of an ancient civilization, to begin as it were 
once more at the beginning. They carry alike 
their homes and their states with them in the camp 
and upon the ordered march of the host. They 
are men of the forest, or else men hardened always 
to take the sea in open boats. They live no more 
roughly in the new lands than in the old. The 
world has been frontier for them from the first. 
They may go forward wdth their life in these new 
seats from where they left off in the old. How 
different the circumstances of our first settlement 
and the building of new states on this side the 
sea ! Englishmen, bred in law and ordered govern- 
ment ever since the Norman lawyers were followed 
a long five hundred years ago across the narrow 
seas by those masterful administrators of the strong 
Plantagenet race, leave an ancient realm and come 
into a wilderness where states have never been ; 
leave a land of art and letters, which saw but yes- 
terday " the spacious times of great Elizabeth," 
where Shakespeare still fives in the gracious leisure 
of his closing days at Stratford, where cities teem 
with trade and men go bravely dight in cloth of 
gold, and turn back six centuries, — nay, a thousand 
years and more, — to the first work of building 
states in a wilderness ! They bring the steadied 



230 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

habits and sobered thoughts of an ancient reahn 
into the wild air of an untouched continent. The 
weary stretches of a vast sea lie, like a full thousand 
years of time, between them and the life in which 
till now all their thought was bred. Here they 
stand, as it were, with all their tools left behind, 
centuries struck out of their reckoning, driven back 
upon the long dormant instincts and forgotten craft 
of their race, not used this long age. Look how 
singular a thing : the work of a primitive race, the 
thought of a civilized ! Hence the strange, almost 
grotesque groupings of thought and affairs in that 
first day of our history. Subtle politicians speak 
the phrases and practice the arts of intricate diplo- 
macy from council chambers placed within log huts 
within a clearing. Men in ruffs and lace and 
polished shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of 
primeval forests. The microscopical distinctions 
of the schools, the thin notes of a metaphysical 
theology are woven in and out through the laby- 
rinths of grave sermons that run hours long upon 
the still air of the wilderness. Belief in dim refine- 
ments of dogma is made the test for man or woman 
who seeks admission to a company of pioneers. 
When went there by an age since the great flood 
when so singular a thing was seen as this : thou- 
sands of civilized men suddenly rusticated and 



THE COUBSE OF AMEBIC AN HISTORY. 231 

bade do the work of primitive peoples, — Europe 
frontiered ! 

Of course there was a deep change wrought, if 
not in these men, at any rate in their children ; 
and every generation saw the change deepen. It 
must seem to every thoughtful man a notable thing 
how, while the change was wrought, the simples 
of things complex were revealed in the clear air of 
the New World : how all accidentals seemed to 
fall away from the structure of government, and 
the simple first principles were laid bare that abide 
always ; how social distinctions were stripped ofp, 
shown to be the mere cloaks and masks they were, 
and every man brought once again to a clear reali- 
zation of his actual relations to his fellows ! It 
was as if trained and sophisticated men had been 
rid of a sudden of their sophistication and of all 
the theory of their life, and left with nothing but 
their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered 
instinct. And the fact that we kept always, for 
close upon three hundred years, a like erement in 
our life, a frontier people always in our van, is, so 
far, the central and determining fact of our national 
history. " East " and " West," an ever-changing 
line, but an unvarying experience and a constant 
leaven of change working always within the body 
of our folk. Our political, our economic, our social 



232 THE COURSE OF AMEBIC AN HISTORY. 

life has felt this potent influence from the wild 
border all our history through. The " West " is 
the great word of our history. The " Westerner" 
has been the type and master of our American life. 
Now at length, as I have said, we have lost our 
frontier : our front lies almost unbroken along all 
the great coast line of the western sea. The West- 
erner, in some day soon to come, will pass out of 
our life, as he so long ago passed out of the life of 
the Old World. Then a new epoch will open for 
us. Perhaps it has opened already. Slowly we 
shall grow old, compact our people, study the deli- 
cate adjustments of an intricate society, and ponder 
the niceties, as we have hitherto pondered the bulks 
and structural framework, of government. Have 
we not, indeed, already come to these things ? But 
the past we know. We can " see it steady and 
see it whole ; " and its central movement and mo- 
tive are gross and obvious to the eye. 

Till the first century of the Constitution is 
rounded' out we stand all the while in the presence 
of that stupendous westward movement which has 
filled the continent : so vast, so various, at times 
so tragical, so swept by passion. Through all the 
long time there has been a line of rude settlements 
along our front wherein the same tests of power 
and of institutions were still being made that were 



d^ 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 233 

made first upon the sloping banks of the rivers of 
old Virginia and within the long sweep of the Bay 
of Massachusetts. The new life of the West has 
reacted all the while — who shall say how power- 
fully ? — upon the older life of the East ; and yet 
the East has moulded the West as if she sent for- 
ward to it through every decade of the long process 
the chosen impulses and suggestions of history. 
The West has taken strength, thought, training, 
selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the 
East, — as if out of a new Orient ; while the East 
has itseK been kept fresh, vital, alert, originative 
by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her 
youth through every age renewed. Who can say in 
a word, in a sentence, in a volume, what destinies 
have been variously wrought, with what new exam^ 
pies of growth and energy, while, upon this unex- 
ampled scale, community has passed beyond com- 
munity across the vast reaches of this great con- 
tinent ! 

The great process is the more significant because 
it has been distinctively a national process. Until 
the Union was formed and we had consciously set 
out upon a separate national career, we moved but 
timidly across the nearer hills. Our most remote 
settlements lay upon the rivers and in the open 
glades of Tennessee and Kentucky. It was in the 



234 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

years that immediately succeeded the war of 1812 
that the movement into the West began to be a 
mighty migration. Till then our eyes had been 
more often in the East than in the West. Not 
only were foreign questions to be settled and our 
standing among the nations to be made good, but 
we still remained acutely conscious and deliberately 
conservative of our Old- World connections. For 
all we were so new a people and lived so simple and 
separate a life, we had still the sobriety and the 
circumspect fashions of action that belong to an old 
society. We were, in government and manners, 
but a disconnected part of the world beyond the 
seas. Its thought and habit still set us our stan- 
dards of speech and action. And this, not because 
of imitation, but because of actual and long abiding 
political and social connection with the mother 
country. Our statesmen, — strike but the names 
of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry from the list, 
together with all like untutored spirits, who stood 
for the new, unreverencing ardor of a young demo- 
cracy, — our statesmen were such men as might 
have taken their places in the House of Commons 
or in the Cabinet at home as naturally and with as 
easy an adjustment to their place and task as in 
the Continental Congress or in the immortal Con- 
stitutional Convention. Think of the stately ways 



THE COURSE OF AMEBIC AN HISTORY. 235 

and the grand air and the authoritative social 
understandings of the generation that set the new 
government afoot, — the generation of Washington 
and John Adams. Think, too, of the conservative 
tradition that guided all the early history of that 
government : that early line of gentlemen Presi- 
dents : that steady " cabinet succession to the Pres- 
idency " which came at length to seem almost like 
an oligarchy to the impatient men who were shut 
out from it. The line ended, with a sort of chill, 
in stiff John Quincy Adams, too cold a man to be 
a people's prince after the old order of Presidents ; 
and the year 1829, which saw Jackson come in, 
saw the old order go out. 

The date is significant. Since the war of 1812, 
undertaken as if to set us free to move westward, 
seven States had been admitted to the Union : and 
the whole number of States was advanced to 
twenty-four. Eleven new States had come into 
partnership with the old tliirteen. The voice of 
the West rang thi'ough all our counsels ; and, in 
Jackson, the new partners took possession of the 
Government. It is worth while to remember how 
men stood amazed at the change : how startled, 
chagrined, dismayed the conservative States of the 
East were at the revolution they saw effected, the 
riot of change they saw set in ; and no man who 



•236 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

has once read the singular story can forget how 
the eight years Jackson reigned saw the Govern- 
ment, and politics themselves, transformed. For 
long, — the story being written in the regions 
where the shock and surprise of the change was 
greatest, — the period of this momentous revolu- 
tion was spoken of amongst us as a period of 
degeneration, the birth-time of a deep and perma- 
nent demoralization in our politics. But we see it 
differently now. Whether we have any taste or 
stomach for that rough age or not, however much 
we may wish that the old order might have stood, 
the generation of Madison and Adams have been 
prolonged, and the good tradition of the early days 
handed on unbroken and unsullied, we now know 
that what the nation underwent in that day of 
change was not degeneration, great and perilous as 
were the errors of the time, but regeneration. 
The old order was changed, once and for all. A 
new nation stepped, with a touch of swagger, upon 
the stage, — a nation which had broken alike with 
the traditions and with the wisely wrought exper- 
ience of the Old World, and which, with all the 
haste and rashness of youth, was minded to work 
out a separate policy and destiny of its own. It 
was a day of hazards, but there was nothing sinister 
at the heart of the new plan. It was a wasteful 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 237 

experiment, to fling out, without wise guides, upon 
untried ways ; but an abounding continent afforded 
enough and to spare even for the wasteful. It was 
sure to be so with a nation that came out of the 
secluded vales of a virgin continent. It was the 
bold frontier voice of the West sounding in affairs. 
The timid shivered, but the robust waxed strong 
and rejoiced, in the tonic air of the new day. 

It was then we swung out into the main paths 
of our history. The new voices that called us were 
first silvery, like the voice of Henry Clay, and 
spoke old familiar words of eloquence. The first 
spokesmen of the West even tried to con the clas- 
sics, and spoke incongruously in the phrases of 
politics long dead and gone to dust, as Benton did. 
But presently the tone changed, and it was the 
truculent and masterful accents of the real fron- 
tiersman that rang dominant above the rest, harsh, 
impatient, and with an evident dash of temper. 
The East slowly accustomed itseK to the change ; 
caught the movement, though it grumbled and 
even trembled at the pace ; and managed most of 
the time to keep in the running. But it was 
always henceforth to be the West that set the 
pace. There is no mistaking the questions that 
have ruled our spirits as a nation during the pre- 
sent century. The public land question, the tariff 



238 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

question, and the question of slavery, — these dom- 
inate from first to last. It was the West that 
made each one of these the question that it was. 
Without the free lands to which every man who 
chose might go, there would not have been that 
easy prosperity of life and that high standard of 
abundance which seemed to render it necessary 
that, if we were to have manufactures and a diver- 
sified industry at all, we should foster new under- 
takings by a system of protection which would 
make the profits of the factory as certain and as 
abundant as the profits of the farm. It was the 
constant movement of the population, the constant 
march of wagon trains into the West, that made it 
so cardinal a matter of policy whether the great 
national domain should be free land or not : and 
that was the land question. It was the settlement 
of the West that transformed slavery from an 
accepted institution into passionate matter of con- 
troversy. 

Slavery within the States of the Union stood 
sufficiently protected by every solemn sanction the 
Constitution could afford. No man could touch it 
there, think, or hope, or purpose what he might. 
But where new States were to be made it was not 
so. There at every step choice must be made: 
slavery or no slavery? — a new choice for every 



THE COURSE OF AMEBIC AN HISTORY. 239 

new State : a fresh act of origination to go with 
every fresh act of organization. Had there been 
no Territories, there could have been no slavery 
question, except by revolution and contempt of 
fundamental law. But with a continent to be peo- 
pled, the choice thrust itself insistently forward at 
every step and upon every hand.' This was the 
slavery question ; not what should be done to re- 
verse the past, but what should be done to redeem 
the future. It was so men of that day saw it, — 
and so also must historians see it. We must not 
mistake the programme of the Anti-Slavery So- 
ciety for the platform of the Republican party, 
or forget that the very war itself was begun ere 
any purpose of abolition took shape amongst those 
who were statesmen and in authority. It was a 
question, not of freeing men, but of preserving a 
Free Soil. Kansas showed us what the problem 
was, not South Carolina : and it was the Supreme 
Court, not the slave-owners, who formulated the 
matter for our thought and purpose. 

And so, upon every hand and throughout every 
national question, was the commerce between East 
and West made up : that commerce and exchange 
of ideas, inclinations, purposes, and principles which 
has constituted the moving force of our life as a 
nation. Men illustrate the operation of these sin- 



240 THE COURSE OF AMEBICAN HISTORY, 

gular forces better than questions can : and no 
man illustrates it better than Abraham Lincoln. 

" Great captains with their guns and drums 

Disturb our judgment for the hour ; 
. But at last silence comes : 

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, 
Our children shall behold his fame, 
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American." 

It is a poet's verdict ; but it rings in the authentic 
tone of the seer. It must be also the verdict of 
history. He would be a rash man who should say 
he understood Abraham Lincoln. No doubt na- 
tures deep as his, and various almost to the point 
of self-contradiction, can be sounded only by the 
judgment of men of a like sort, — if any such there 
be. But some things we all may see and judge 
concerning him. You have in him the type and 
flower of our growth. It is as if Nature had made 
a typical American, and then had added with lib- 
eral hand the royal quality of genius, to show us 
what the type could be. Lincoln owed nothing to 
his birth, everything to his growth : had no training 
save what he gave himseK ; no nurture, but only a 
wild and native strength. His life was his school- 
ing, and every day of it gave to his character a 
new touch of development. His manhood not only, 



THE COUESE OF AMEBIC AN HISTORY. 241 

but his perception also, expanded with his Kfe. 
His eyes, as they looked more and more abroad, 
beheld the national Hfe, and comprehended it : and 
the lad who had been so rough-cut a provincial 
became, when grown to manhood, the one leader in 
all the nation who held the whole people singly in 
his heart : - — held even the Southern people there, 
and would have won them back. And so we have 
in him what we must call the perfect development 
of native strength, the rounding out and nationali- 
zation of the provincial. Andrew Jackson was a 
type, not of the nation, but of the West. For all 
the tenderness there was in the stormy heart of 
the masterful man, and staunch and simple loyalty 
to all who loved him, he learned nothing in the 
East; kept always the flavor of the rough school in 
which he had been bred ; was never more than a 
frontier soldier and gentleman. Lincoln differed 
from Jackson by all the length of his unmatched 
capacity to learn. Jackson could understand only 
men of his own kind; Lincoln could understand 
men of all sorts and from every region of the land : 
seemed himself, indeed, to be all men by turns, as 
mood succeeded mood in his strange nature. He 
never ceased to stand, in his bony angles, the 
express image of the ungainly frontiersman. His 
mind never lost the vein of coarseness that had 



242 TEE COUESE OF AMERICAN HISTOEY. 

marked him grossly when a youth. And yet how 
he grew and strengthened in the real stuff of dig- 
nity and greatness : how nobly he could bear him- 
self without the aid of grace ! He kept always the 
shrewd and seeing eye of the woodsman and the 
hunter, and the flavor of wild life never left him ; 
and yet how easily his view widened to great 
affairs ; how surely he perceived the value and the 
significance of whatever touched him and made 
him neighbor to itself ! 

Lincoln's marvelous capacity to extend his com- 
prehension to the measure of what he had in hand 
is the one distinguishing mark of the man : and to 
study the development of that capacity in him is 
little less than to study, where it is as it were per- 
fectly registered, the national life itself. This boy 
lived his youth in Illinois when it was a frontier 
State. The youth of the State was coincident with 
his own : and man and State kept equal pace in 
their striding advance to maturity. The frontier 
population was an intensely pohtical population. 
•It felt to the quick the throb of the nation's Hfe, 
— for the nation's life ran through it, going its 
eager way to the westward. The West was not 
separate from the East. Its communities were 
every day receiving fresh members from the East, 
and the fresh impulse of direct suggestion. Their 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 243 

blood flowed to them straisflit from the warmest 
veins of the older communities. More than that, 
elements which were separated in the East were 
mingled in the West : which displayed to the eye 
as it were a sort of epitome of the most active and 
permanent forces of the national life. In such 
communities as these Lincoln mixed daily from the 
first with men of every sort and from every quarter 
of the country. With them he discussed neighbor- 
hood politics, the pohtics of the State, the politics 
of the nation, — and his mind became traveled as 
he talked. How plainly amongst such neighbors, 
there in Illinois, must it have become evident that 
national questions were centring more and more in 
the West as the years went by : coming as it were 
to meet them. Lincoln went twice down the 
Mississippi, upon the slow rafts that carried wares 
to its mouth, and saw with his own eyes, so used 
to look directly and point-blank upon men and 
affairs, characteristic regions of the South. He 
worked his way slowly and sagaciously, with that 
larger sort of sagacity which so marked him all his 
life, into the active business of state politics ; sat 
twice in the state legislature, and then for a term 
in Congress, — his sensitive and seeing mind open 
all the while to every turn of fortune and every 
touch of nature in the moving affairs he looked 



244 THE COUBSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

upon. AU the wMle, too, he continued to canvass, 
piece by piece, every item of politics, as of old, 
with his neighbors, familiarly around the stove, or 
upon the corners of the street, or more formally 
upon the stump ; and kept always in direct contact 
with the ordinary views of ordinary men. Mean- 
while he read, as nobody else around him read, 
and sought to gain a complete mastery over speech, 
with the conscious purpose to prevail in its use; 
derived zest from the curious study of mathemat- 
ical proof, and amusement as well as strength from 
the practice of clean and naked statements of 
truth. It was all irregularly done, but stren- 
uously, with the same instinct throughout, and with 
a steady access of facility and power. There was 
no sudden leap for this man, any more than for 
other men, from crudeness to finished power, from 
an understanding of the people of Illinois to an 
understanding of the people of the United States. 
And thus he came at last, with infinite pains and a 
wonder of endurance, to his great national task 
with a self-trained capacity which no man could 
match, and made upon a scale as hberal as the life 
of the people. You could not then set this athlete 
a pace in learning or in perceiving that was too 
hard for him. He knew the people and their life 
as no other man did or could : and now stands in 



THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 245 

his place singular in aU the annals of mankind, the 
" brave, sagacious, foreseeing, patient man " of the 
people, " new birth of our new soil, the first 
American." 

We have here a national man presiding over 
sectional men. Lincoln understood the East better 
than the East understood him or the people from 
whom he sprung : and this is every way a very 
noteworthy circumstance. For my part, I read a 
lesson in the singular career of this great man. Is 
it possible the East remains sectional while the 
West broadens to a wider view ? 

" Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines ; 
By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs," 

is an inspiring programme for the woodsman and 
the pioneer ; but how are you to be brown-handed 
in a city office ? What if you never see the upright 
pines ? How are you to have- so big a purpose on 
so small a part of the hemisphere ? As it has 
grown old, unquestionably, the East has grown 
sectional. There is no suggestion of the prairie in 
its city streets, or of the embrowned ranchman and 
farmer in its well-dressed men. Its ports teem with 
shipping from Europe and the Indies. Its news- 
papers run upon the themes of an Old World. It 
hears of the great plains of the continent as of for- 
eign parts, which it may never think to see except 



246 THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

from a car window. Its life is self-centred and 
selfish. The West, save where special interests 
centre (as in those pockets of silver where men's 
eyes catch as it were an eager gleam from the very 
ore itself) : the West is in less danger of sectional- 
ization. Who shall say in that wide country where 
one region ends and another begins, or, in that free 
and changing society, where one class ends and 
another begins ? 

This, surely, is the moral of our history. The 
East has spent and been spent for the West : has 
given forth her energy, her young men and her sub- 
stance, for the new regions that have been a-making 
all the century through. But has she learned as 
much as she has taught, or taken as much as she 
has given ? Look what it is that has now at last 
taken place. The westward march has stopped, 
upon the final slopes of the Pacific ; and now the 
plot thickens. Populations turn upon their old 
paths ; fill in the spaces they passed by neglected 
in their first journey in search of a land of promise ; 
settle to a life such as the East knows as well as 
the West, — nay, much better. TV^ith the change, 
the pause, the settlement, our people draw into 
closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other 
and be known : and the time has come for the East 
to learn in her turn ; to broaden her understanding 



THE COUBSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 247 

of political and economic conditions to the scale of 
a hemisphere, as her own poet bade. Let us be 
sure that we get the national temperament ; send 
our minds abroad upon the continent, become 
neighbors to all the people that live upon it, and 
lovers of them all, as Lincoln was. 

Read but your history aright, and you shall not 
find the task too hard. Your own local history, 
look but deep enough, tells the tale you must take 
to heart. Here upon our own seaboard, as truly as 
ever in the West, was once a national frontier, with 
an elder East bej^ond the seas. Here, too, various 
peoples combined, and elements separated elsewhere 
effected a tolerant and wholesome mixture. Here, 
too, the national stream flowed full and strong, bear- 
ing a thousand things upon its currents. Let us 
resume and keep the vision of that time ; know 
ourselves, our neighbors, our destiny, with lifted 
and open eyes ; see our history truly, in its great 
proportions ; be ourselves liberal as the great prin- 
ciples we profess ; and so be the people who might 
have again the heroic adventures and do again the 
heroic work of the past. 'T is thus we shall renew 
our youth and secure our age against decay. 






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